


les illuminations en douche et d'autres miracles pubères

by noirshitsuji



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: And Dumb Adults, Awesome Alya Césaire, Awesome Nino Lahiffe, Background Relationships, Canon Played Straight, Chloé Bourgeois Redemption, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Crack with Plot, Eventual reveal, Everybody is Sleep-Deprived, F/M, Fluff, Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth Being Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Gabriel Agreste's A+ Parenting, Gabriel Agreste's Past, Gen, Half-Decent French, Hormones, Hot Mess Adrien Agreste, Hot Mess Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Implied/Referenced Ableism - if you squint at chapter 6, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Light Angst, Light Hysteria, Lila Rossi Being a Jerk, Lots of Very Bad Ideas, Magic Meta, Marichat | Adrien Agreste as Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Meta, Meta Consciousness, Mild Language, Minor Alya Césaire/Nino Lahiffe, Minor Angst, Miraculous Ladybug Love Square, Nathalie Sancoeur Does Not Get Paid Enough, Nathalie Sancoeur's Past, Nino Lahiffe Is So Done, Nino Lahiffe Is The Smartest Person Here, Nino is Actually Luka, OOC, Oblivious Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir and Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, POV Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, POV Alternating, POV Alya Césaire, POV Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, POV Marinette Dupain-Cheng, POV Nathalie Sancoeur, POV Third Person, Past Drug Addiction, Politics, Poor Nathalie Sancoeur, Save Nooroo (Miraculous Ladybug), Shower Epiphanies, Slightly Unhinged Ladybug, Suicidal Thoughts, The Save Nooroo Foundation, These Dumb Kids, Unhealthy Relationships, Unresolved Romantic Tension, When will you learn that your actions have international consequences?, character backstory, dark humour, everybody is OOC, fandom memes, international politics, mild sexual humour, various povs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:35:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26146501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noirshitsuji/pseuds/noirshitsuji
Summary: Shower epiphanies and other pubescent miracles: of Marichat, emotional teenage delinquency, adults' questionable understanding of how the world works or should work, political power play, investigations, reveals, memes, half-baked meta, and the first-ever Save Nooroo Foundation (that the author is aware of).Or, simply put: canon on crack, featuring Adrien “romantic pro-gamer” Agreste, Marinette ”Schroedinger’s Very Tired™ friend” Dupain-Cheng, Gabriel “you don't need the two most powerful objects in the universe, you just need a therapist” Agreste,  Plagg and Tikki “five more minutes of this and they'll be throwing hands with the Meta Consciousness for putting them here" the kwamis, and many, many more.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 70
Kudos: 106





	1. le génie est né du cécité

**Author's Note:**

> Canonical order of events, you say? Oh, my dear: time is an illusion. The linear perspective most people abide by is below the transcendental nature of this crackfic. Everything has already happened or is yet to happen at my discretion. I am the only god here, and my servants are long sentences, half-sequitur meta, and mild incomprehension of how the English language is supposed to function. Stylistic consistency? Charactorial consistency? Actual comedy? Never heard of them. If you enjoy it, let me know why, in the name of-

“Ladybug,” Adrien said, towel around his shoulders, hair still dripping.

Plagg eyed him over his piece of cheese. The kid looked like he’d reached an epiphany and was reading it off of his climbing wall. Plagg continued munching on his camembert, waiting as if for a computer screen to load.

Adrien stared at the wall for five minutes. And then for five more. And then for another five.

It occurred to Plagg, then, that it was time for The Talk. 

The Talk was a special kind of merciful lie the kwami had constructed that hinged on physiological discrepancies, bullshit metaphysics of transmission, and lots and lots of alcohol. It was a foolproof way of convincing his chosen that black cats and ladybugs, while operating well as embodiments of destructive and creative forces, were not actually suited as romantic partners. Plagg reserved it only for the best of his kits, by which was meant the ones who had luck so bad they could pine away until the end of time and the ladybug wielder would  _ still  _ not look at them as more than the other half of their soul -  _ just in a platonic sense, obviously! _

(Poor Elena, she had not lasted long after that particular remark had been thrown at her. She’d decided to see if she could get away with cataclysming the bees’ nest in her garden instead of going through the hassle of calling exterminators. Satisfaction, unfortunately, had not brought her back. 

If Plagg had a penny for every time a chosen of his died a death worthy of being nominated for the Darwin awards, he’d have bought Adrien out of his father already.)

“Marinette,” Adrien said this time, nodding once again, chin held between stroking forefinger and thumb, the small smile on his face evidently admiring his own idea. Plagg could easily see his brain tick by the lines the kid formed with his mental laser-pointer between different footholds in the climbing wall. 

(All of his wielders ended up developing that visualization trick, which was useful for strategising in battle, but detrimental to any other forms of productivity). 

Plagg realised that, whatever this was, The Talk was not going to help him this time. He swallowed his cheese whole. “Kid, care to enlighten me as to your thought process?”

Adrien finally turned to look at him. “We’ve been talking about how I should try and get over Ladybug.”

Plagg blinked. Then he blinked again. Three times, to be sure he’d processed that correctly. “No, we haven’t.”

“Haven’t we? Sorry, in my head, we have been, for the past three days or so.”

The six akumas in those days had, apparently, messed with his head more than Plagg had anticipated. True, the peanut allergy one had been terrifying, but...“Right. We’ve been talking in your dreams, then. What brought this on?”

“Just. You know. An idea. I had it in the shower the other day and thought...why not try it? There are other attractive people around, which I feel like I may be underappreciating because I’m so fixated on her, and it would be a good experience. We’re not in a relationship, I don’t owe her any sort of emotional loyalty just because I happened to fall head-over-heels for her first. I should try to be happy, too.” As he’d spoken, Adrien had moved to dry off his hair - slowly, methodically, as if following his very precise and logical thought process.

Plagg blinked again. “Right.” He paused, finally caught up, thinking about how it was best that cats always act on gut and not on brain. He was happy the kid had somehow gotten more emotional development in the span of three days than certain adults did in their entire lives, but– “And you want to try with-”

“–with Marinette, yeah.”

Plagg willed himself to stay calm; he wasn’t sure if by emitting the combined sound of amusement and despair he wanted to he wouldn’t blow Adrien’s eardrums off or not. He desperately hoped his violent nodding could be construed as ‘enthusiasm’ and not a desperate attempt to hide his internal laughter. “So, what’s the plan?”

“I’ll go over to her place now and ask her out.”

“Okay. Get some camembert for the transformation back, please.”

Adrien looked at him. “There won’t be a second transformation,” he said, looking at his kwami as if  _ he  _ was the one making none of the sense in this conversation. 

Plagg, after millennia of dealing with teenage stupidity, was unpleasantly surprised at the fact that he could still be stupefied at anything that came out of the kid’s mouth.

“I’ll propose to her as Chat Noir. She - well, she’s definitely more friendly with Chat Noir, she can actually speak in complete sentences around him-” _I wonder why,_ Plagg thought _,_ dryly, “to the point that, since I started visiting her–” _a few times, which I’d_ ** _hoped_** _was because you’d reached a different_ ** _sort_** _of enlightenment related to her_ “–every week, we’ve grown very close, which I haven’t been quite able to do yet as Adrien. And...Mari’s a great girl.”

It was very rarely that Plagg channeled ‘parentally concerned’ Tikki. It spoke to how much of a potential trainwreck a situation had to be for that to happen, probably. “What about Hawkmoth danger?”

“Hawkmoth’s been targeting our class anyway; he was going to get to her eventually, if he could, but Mari’s a strong girl, she wouldn’t give in to him easily.” He got that disgusting twinkle in his eyes whenever he talked about “both” girls now. Plagg gave up. “And it’s been a month already. Even  _ he  _ needs rest, apparently, otherwise he would have aimed for her - or maybe he has enough potential targets lined up, I don’t know. And–”

“Okay, okay, fine,” the kwami said, tired of this conversation already. __

Sometimes, black cats just needed to be their best (self-)destructive selves. This absolute minefield of a situation the kit was about to walk into looked like just one of these moments. The calmness on his face, cognisant of a soldier in the Great War accepting his death, was proof enough of that. Even if Plagg  _ could  _ explain to him why this was a bad idea, there would be no point.

The kwami grinned. Despite being the one with all the bad luck, out of the two of them with Tikki, he was the optimistic one. Their idiots couldn’t  _ possibly  _ do anything as bad as what happened in Plagg’s worst nightmares (Darwin-award-worthy was a comparatively  _ harmless  _ way to go, all things considered), but neither could the situation resolve itself as ideally as in Tikki’s best daydreams. She suffered from that; he found the absurdity of it too funny to bear sometimes. 

And chaos could be productive, too. And, really, the kid couldn’t have chosen a  _ better  _ person to move on to, all things considered.

“Plagg, claws out!”

* * *

Nooroo watched his master pace around the room, bumping into low-flying butterflies blindly as he did so, eyes bloodshot from only two hours of sleep (blackout) in the past seventy-two. 

Nooroo sucked on his milkweed, wishing he could be as carefree as these butterflies, even as Gabriel stomped on a few of them. They were a pure, blank slate, ready to take on any emotion around them, feeling nothing in and of themselves. Nooroo, on the other hand, was like the roundabout on the Arc de Triomphe on Friday evening at six: a dumping point for all the anger and frustration of one of the world’s biggest cities. 

Except that streets didn’t  _ have  _ emotions. The kwami sighed at the thought:  _ oh, to be made of pavement and unable to feel.  _ His master kept his ‘positive experiences diet’ to a minimum only challenged by the one he unconsciously imposed on his son. (Nooroo at least  _ hoped  _ it was unconsciously - Gabriel Agreste was not an exceptionally empathetic man, but could he really be this dense? He  _ had  _ once told Nooroo to never question the limits of his abilities in  _ any  _ regard, though...)

His master stopped pacing, back turned to the butterfly-themed window that overlooked Paris. The window had been an expensive installation, not least because of the cover-up of the murder of the workers who’d done it, and needed to be admired as much as possible, he’d reasoned to Nooroo in one of his unsolicited soliloquies. It was weird, then, to find him, instead, staring at the purple (because when Gabriel Agreste took on an aesthetic, it was  _ final _ ) wall, especially with hunched shoulders and maniacal smile lacking.

Nooroo suddenly felt more anxious than usual. ‘Usual’ was a concept he nowadays calibrated to the scale of his entire existence, though, because it, while having its ups and downs, had up until this point balanced out in terms of positive-negative emotions; it was actually his current master’s very  _ being  _ that ‘brought on more of his anxiety than usual’, and saying so for any part of the experience of being the man’s servant was equally as true. Knowing his luck, though…

“Preposterous,” his master snapped straight, the specific type of sadistic anger he’d perfected as an art form at there being no one to akumatise sparkling in his eyes. “The entirety of Paris’ hearts bared before me and not a single soul’s anger, shame, sadness, or guilt to feed on. It seems that the emotional management plan Ladybug devised to helped them avoid akumatisation is  _ actually  _ working. Can you  _ believe  _ that I used to think the yoga industry was actually one of my greatest allies since it got more people fit enough to be my clients? Oh, youthful folly!”

Nooroo didn’t reply. He would have liked to point out that since his master’s idea of ‘everybody' comprised his son’s class, their families, and the unlucky stranger he happened to take a liking to for whatever reason once every few months and then exploit as much as possible, (the kwami could not, and hoped he  _ would  _ not, understand the man’s fervent belief that Mr. Pigeon was bound to succeed if he really put his heart into it properly  _ just one time _ ), but a) he had long since learned that attempting to give his master constructive feedback was not part of his assigned job description, b) there was something highly disturbing about the fact that that man had just used the phrase  _ feed on  _ in relation to these people’s emotions _ ,  _ and c) any moment Gabriel spent in silence around him was a cherished blessing, and he was more likely to do so if Nooroo  _ didn't _ reply.

The kwami enjoyed the peace for another five minutes, internally sighing when he saw the maniacal grin return - slowly but surely, like Natalie advancing on the man with paperwork he  _ had  _ to sign on his bad days with the step of a gazelle trying not to anger a sleeping lion. Nooroo tried to prepare himself for what would follow. He never managed to, but maybe  _ just one time- _

"Of course," Gabriel said, snapping his fingers for dramatic effect, the target audience of which was unclear. "There are other emotions I could turn to. One specific one that I don't often tap into, but would be perfect for this case."

Nooroo had lived through 350,000 cycles; it was entirely unclear to him how  _ anything  _ that man said had the capability to unpleasantly surprise him (even more than 'usual'), but the next bit certainly did. 

"Nooroo, dark wings rise! It's time to make use of people's fear of being akumatised."

The kwami started humming his go-to therapy song. Brooches, thankfully, could not emit noises, but a part of him he hoped against hope that maybe  _ this time,  _ Ladybug or Chat Noir would hear him..

_ "I need a hero…" _

* * *

Tikki glanced up from her corner upon hearing a knock at the skylight. A dark shadow was pacing back and forth over it; it could have been anyone if not for the fact that it was doing so on all fours - so, really, it could only be  _ one  _ (at this point maybe even  _ half- _ ) person. She sighed; she’d need to wake up her chosen from a well-deserved (and much needed, as signified by the shopping bags under her eyes) nap over Pile of Homework #3, but ignoring the black cat or its wielder was, eight times out of seven, a more disastrous decision than the alternative.

(Tikki was still unable to even  _ glance  _ at pictures of the Leaning Tower of Pisa  _ or  _ drawings of the Colossus of Rhodes. Most of the other ancient wonders she could stand to look at, though second-hand embarrassment threatened to crush her there, for precisely the  _ opposite  _ reason. The only explanation she could find for why so many ladybug wielders had been inspired to make bets with their partners about the hypothetical maximum of Cataclysm’s power was ‘bad influence’, and the fact that the metaphysical balance of the universe required this influence was one of the most persistent causes of the kwami’s neurotic episodes. Still, she’d rather have  _ that  _ than the cats making decisions on their own; the  _ actual  _ etymology of the word  _ cat _ astrophe was not privy to many, but Tikki  _ knew. _ )

“Marinette! Wake up, you have a visitor,” she said, floating close to the girl’s face and ticking it with her antennas (the most effective way of waking her up they’d established after two whole months of trying every available alarm ringtone). The string of noises that emanated from the girl almost made Tikki double-check that she hadn’t accidentally left the fox miraculous on her person instead of returning it to Fu the previous day. 

(Last year, her chosen had come to the conclusion that she needed to know the other kwamis better if she really was inevitably inheriting the guardian role one day. To do so, she’d taken to wearing an extra miraculous on her person for a day every few days. When September had had record sunshine, though, she’d opted to keep the horse miraculous for a bit longer. Kaalki was a tough nut to crack, she’d reasoned to Tikki, but the ladybug kwami had seen for herself how much the idea had stroked his ego and predisposed him to morph into all sorts of ‘cool shades’, as the kids said these days. 

Then came the day of Marinette’s first attempt - out of a self-imposed maximum of 121, that is - at getting Adrien’s attention that year. She’d been so distracted and nervous she’d expressed her enthusiasm at seeing him the usual way horses did it vocally: by  _ neighing _ . Attempt number two was still postponed for the foreseeable future, and she had not  _ purposefully  _ retained a second miraculous for more than an hour since. )

There was, if Tikki wasn’t messing up her memes again, one way to check if her chosen having Trixx was the case, though...

“Marinette, what does the fox say?”

The dying whale noises qualified for their most reassuring interaction of the day (the rest having been either silence or half-hearted catastrophising). Her chosen slowly stood up without opening her eyes, then rubbed at them with the ferocity with which she did her sketches with an eraser. Tikki watched what had become essentially her wake-up routine - rub eyes, do a handstand, spin around on hands in a circle, stand up, a few jumping jacks, a big yawn, a slow roll-down and up, and done. She didn’t know  _ how  _ that managed to make her look presentable and energise her sufficiently to function, but it  _ did.  _

(Tikki herself had certainly  _ not  _ programmed any complete exhaustion-erasing functions in the human body when she’d created it. The whole of human social  _ co _ hesion and  _ co _ operation hinged on  _ co _ dependency, so them always having a weakness in any given physical respect was a necessity.)

Marinette then walked over to her skylight and opened it from her position on her bed, wasting no time on seizing Chat Noir’s tail and dragging him in. Tikki flew into her corner again as she did so. He landed on his feet this time, so the kwami concluded he wasn’t too far gone from his humanity yet (Plagg thought it was funny, the animal instincts overtaking, and encouraged it as much as he could; Tikki begged to disagree). Marinette climbed back down to stand in front of him. She stared. And stared. And stared. The boy didn’t flinch, but started raising his hand to his mouth, tongue poking out, but quickly dropped it once he noticed her raised eyebrow. 

Tikki felt herself sag with relief; maybe this time, a Jellicle black cat would be avoided–

“Princess, is now a good time? You seem tired–” he said, expression somewhere between unconscious adoration and genuine concern.

Marinette yawned, half-annoyed and still sleepy, but Tikki saw her posture relax. “I am, but you’re already here, kitty, so tell me why you came. I have more homework to do, anyway, since I’m three days behind, so I had to wake up anyway.”

(Once Marinette had discovered that, whatever she said to Chat Noir, he would never question her further, she’d mostly stopped bothering trying to conceal facts about her daily existence that might reveal either her alter ego or her civilian identity as Ladybug. If he hadn’t gotten it after the “Oh, I just  _ happened to be in College Dupont  _ before Horrificator sealed the building off,” then he never would, had been her reasoning. 

Tikki had wanted to point out the irony in the latter, but had instead spent the next thirty seconds staring at the wall, questioning...a lot of things. The exact mechanics of kwami concealment magic, for example; another regular neuroticism-inducing topic.)

“I have a proposition for you,” Chat said, pulling a rose out of the-meta-conscious-knows-where.

“Oh?” Her chosen peaked slightly even in her tired state.

“Marinette Dupain-Cheng, would you go out on a date with me?”

Tikki could pinpoint the exact second her chosen’s brain glitched as she accepted the flower. Her expression didn’t change significantly - she merely looked slightly surprised. Her hands went limp after taking the rose, though, and Marinette’s hands  _ never  _ went limp. Her entire self-preservation strategy hinged on her waving them around like the wings of a helicopter about to crash in a desperate attempt to protect herself, a transgenerational instinct that gave every next ladybug reincarnation the ability to properly wield the yo-yo. (Why that may be Tikki was, once again, in the dark; leaving empty lines in the human code had seemed like a fun idea in terms of potential for future growth at the time, but she was starting to regret trusting the Meta Conscious  _ that much _ ).

Chat Noir gazed at her, completely calm, as if having fully expected precisely this type of reply. 

“Ladybug?” was what Marinette, after a minute more of staring, managed to utter. It sounded like she was questioning herself more about why she was  _ putting the word forward  _ as a question rather than asking him something, though.

He shrugged, hands reaching to lock behind his neck. “She doesn’t want me, so I’ve given up - have for a while now, to be honest. There are other great people out there, people I’d love to date...though, if I have to be honest, the plural is theoretical. In reality, I’d only really like to date you.”

Tikki had seen the expression forming on Marinette’s face more than a thousand times. It was the face of the ladybug who, not realising the chase could ever be over, had taken it for granted that it never would be. That was, after all, just how their dynamic worked with her kitten: he chased and she ran because she didn’t want to be caught. Except the chase ended and when she turned around, she found out that she  _ did _ , and  _ what the hell else was  _ **_the point_ ** _ of a game of tag if not  _ **_this_ ** _? _

_ What fun was a chase if the roles always remained the same, though?  _ Plagg would say, and Tikki would hate him for it because he was right. She hated non-self-instigated change, but she acknowledged its (occasional) usefulness.

Whether it would be so in this case, only time could tell. Marinette, at least, had luck: her partner was giving up on chasing her...to chase  _ her  _ again _.  _ That wasn’t always the case; when it was, though, the response to the situation was always the same.

“Okay,” Marinette said, snapping into composure faster than someone running on five different types of caffeinated drinks and twenty minutes of sleep at her age should. Tikki felt proud, suddenly, even as she detected the bitter irony in her smile.

Chat didn’t appear to notice it, though. “Great,” he said, grinning back even wider somehow. “How about we–”

The akuma alarm blasted through the streets of Paris. Tikki cursed whoever had decided the proper sound effect for that was the combined flutter of a thousand butterfly wings increased to maximum volume and pitch. The two teenagers slammed their hands over their ears as she picked up a cookie to power up with.

After thirty seconds, the first alarm sounding ended and Chat looked up at Marinette’s skylight with the trademarked black cat calm-before-the-Cataclysm face on, hands still over his ears. “Duty calls, it seems,” he said, more loudly than necessary, “I’ll come again tomorrow and then we can figure it out, okay?”

Marinette nodded, still mostly dumb, but managed to muster one last smile for Chat as he peeked at her before climbing up and out. Then, she let her expression blanch completely and turned to Tikki in her corner. Tikki shoved the last bite from her cookie into her mouth, hoping Tom and Sabine hadn’t heard Chat shout from downstairs; it would not be a pleasant evening, it seemed.

“Tikki,” Marinette muttered, sounding like she belonged more in a grave than anywhere else at that moment, and, really, the kwami couldn’t blame her. “Spots on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is not only my first foray into crackfic in roughly a year and a half, but it is also my first attempt at a multichap in four. Really, I'm mostly just here for the shitposting, but I'd love to see what people think of this nevertheless. Also - don't take my French at face value. Actual chapter title meaning for this one was intended to be 'genius is born in blindness'. Credit given where such is due - the Jellicle Chat Noir meme was inspired by this post: https://noirshitsuji.tumblr.com/post/624888758626566144/gale-of-the-nomads-chimpukampu-jellicle-chat
> 
> Updates once every three weeks, at this point, I think. You can find me on Tumblr in the meanwhile - I'm noirshitsuji on there, too. Happy reading.


	2. et donc, il doit y avoir une raison; qu'est-ce que c'est?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "and so there must be a reason; what is it?"  
> In which adults always know best. Not.

The new Prefect of Police for the region of Paris was already at the scene when Ladybug landed next to Chat Noir on the Trocadéro. This didn’t surprise her in the least, not only because of the man’s persistent insistence over the last month on disrupting their work to do things ‘the adult way’ (Sabrina’s father had, unfortunately, been quite unsuccessful at convincing him that questioning Ladybug’s authority was a _bad_ decision on a _lucky_ day, and not even because of anything she could or would do) but also because Chat’s ears had taken to doing a very visible, very distinctive _twitch_ at the sound of him.

“What is he going on about now?” she said, already trying to gauge by the man’s expression how much after the fight she’d need to stay to satisfy him, like a mother putting her restless child to sleep.

“Something, something, who gave these kids superpowers in the first place, how many conventions on child soldiers is their participation breaking, something, something, conclusion: ‘isn’t it past their bedtime anyway?’” Chat replied, pulling out his baton as he did so.

“The president’s been breathing down his neck after another call with the UN, then? Brilliant,” she replied, spinning her yo-yo absent-mindedly as she moved her eyes to scan the scene. (Neither of their voices contained any emotion whatsoever; their banter, she distantly realised, had become as much an instinctive, thoughtless reaction to their circumstances as their teamwork was.

The thought about what else they could make instinctive between them popped into her head, but the path it led to was quickly discarded for her lack of a) RAM, b) a quiet corner to scream in, and c) _sleep._ )

Chat inclined his head thoughtfully to the side, as if fully tuning in to the conversation below them. “I think he intends to talk with us about something actually meaningful after this. I can handle him, if you want, you look too tired to be anywhere but in bed, actually.”

She scanned his face; the bags under his eyes looked worse, though only by a margin, compared to hers (meaning that he hadn’t even had the luxury of twenty minutes of sleep, which, in hindsight, she _should_ have known as soon as she’d seen him before this). “No, don’t worry, I’ll suffer through him this time. I managed to catch some sleep earlier.”

“Ladybug–”

She looked him dead (tired) in the eye. “Chat. This is not negotiable.”

Whether it was because of his exhaustion or his deep-seated non-confrontational reflexes when it came to her, he just pursed his lips in that ‘I would play the self-sacrificing game but the sooner we finish this the sooner we both crash, so fine, you win this time’ way.

(If she had a penny for each time that had happened this week, she’d have two pennies, which wasn’t a lot, but it was weird that it had happened twice, as it qualified the look for her **Chapter 9: Facial Expressions** in her **_Chat Noir Handbook©️_ **.)

“So,” Ladybug started, intent on getting to bed as soon as yesterday, “has this akuma been doing anything else other than walking around,” she squinted her eyes; _touching people’s breasts?_ “molesting its victims and turning them into...project groups?” It was only as she said this that she’d finally processed the scene in front of her: the akuma, having fallen prey to Hawkmoth’s terrible fashion sense, was walking around, slapping their right palm against people’s chests, and then leaving them to sit around in circles and engage each other in conversation which, judging by their faces, seemed entirely too bland.

Chat stared at them, cat ears straining forward. “They’re debating their newfound emotionless existence. Apparently, the akuma has rid them of all of their feelings. Ah, fuck,” he frowned, ears twitching. Ladybug realised she was staring at them, the nearly uncontrollable urge to touch them seizing upon her. “One of the philosophy professors is somehow still having a breakdown because he just realised he could no longer either think Sisyphus happy nor the rest of humankind - the chains restricting his freedom.”

“One of them?”

“There are at least four.” Another ear twitch. She was starting to get dizzy. “All in the same group.”

“Lovely,” she said, turning to focus on the scene again. “Do you think it has any special combat powers? Not that I can’t appreciate how existentially dreadful being void of all emotion must be even on the third akuma fight of the day, but I don’t quite understand what Hawkmoth’s plan is here.”

“Neither do I. The people themselves sound like they’ve just found the most boring form of inner peace possible, but of inner peace, nonetheless, and his entire power rests on being able to manipulate others through emotion, so unless whatever he wants our miraculous for is a _really good fucking cause,_ I highly doubt he’s convincing what is currently the group of least irrational human beings on the planet - those present here, in having switched off 15 hours ago, excluded - to fight for it.”

Ladybug suddenly became aware of the fact that she’d been spinning her yo-yo up and down for ten minutes already and let it fall - no use wasting energy, even if the fight didn’t look like it would last long. As she did so, she spotted a familiar pin on top of the akuma’s ugly hat. “Mylène. She’s….mentioned to a friend before that she’s very afraid of being akumatised again, even if her kryptonite _was_ people being nice to her. Do you think...”

“...that Hawkmoth used her fear to akumatise her because there were no other options available in the problem children and co. pool....”

“...and because, if we are on death’s door after the past three days, he must be ten stories down to hell already? I do.”

(Oh, another thought: how totally-not-one-of-her-favourite-romantic-clichés it was, this finishing-each-other’s-sentences shtick. 

She would _kill_ if it meant she could a) get away with it and b) subsequently sleep for the next ten days in peace. Solution: target Hawkmoth. Problem: location unavailable. Conclusion: fuck her life.)

“What do we do, then?”

Ladybug shrugged at that and just called her lucky charm. An MP3 player fell into her hands. She put it to her ear, played the beginning of the only available song on it, and then immediately regretted doing so.

Chat’s ears twitched again, this time - along with his left eye, highlighting exactly how big the bag under it was (the fact that she nevertheless found that adorable disturbed her greatly). He didn’t even ask.

(Oh, mind-reading, too. How _lovely_.

She wished for death.)

* * *

The only reason the battle hadn’t ended thirty seconds after Ladybug had realised what the intended (– _by the Meta Consciousness? no, no brainpower for that metaphysical rabbit hole now–_ ) use for her Lucky Charm was because potentially humiliating Ivan on national TV a) was not something that boy either deserved or needed and b) would only prolong the night even more if he got akumatised because of it. Getting sufficiently close to Mylène to play her the recording at a volume undetectable by the cameras was not hard, given the 250-meter radius Ladybug had advocated for (passive-aggressively threatened into) being implemented into the law years ago for the news outlets to follow, and after that, it was only a matter of breaking the pin only to restore it ten seconds later after throwing the MP3 in the air, standard-issue little white butterfly flying away. The only reason they’d even used Chat’s cataclysm to break the pin was so that they’d both have the ‘timer running out, gotta go preserve my secret identity so that Hawkmoth can’t target me and my family’ excuse on their side, though it had not escaped their notice how blatant in his ‘subtlety’ the Prefect always was in attempting to detain them after a fight for ‘debriefing’ (he’d tried stopping them from leaving by force once, but a little social media magic and a week of angry-mob protests were enough to convince him not to do so again).

This time, though, the Prefect of the Police seemed like he was going to engage them in an actual conversation. Ladybug had already started associating that particular glint in his eyes with one of his more...profound ideas. She steeled herself, cursing the cameras that remained on-site (no doubt arranged by him); she couldn’t just tell him ‘no’ and yo-yo away before–

“Ladybug, Chat Noir, excellent job as always,” he said, moving to shake their hands (he had attempted to pet Chat on the head one time, and one time only; the boy’s glare would have made Gabriel Agreste apologise for his insolence). “Well, on the field, at least; outside of it, I’m afraid, it seems your efforts have been in vain, as evidenced by the repeated akumatisation of Ms. Haprèle.”

–and there it was.

“Your negative emotional management programme is not working. I am sorry to say this, but it seems like it is our plan–” his proud smirk, which the casual observer could mistake for an apologetic grin, gave away all illusion as to which singular figure stood behind this ‘our’, “–will need to be put in motion.”

Ladybug was too tired for this. “Mr. Purrain,” she started, slowly, imitating calmness when she was really aiming for the type of condescension reserved for small children who refused to understand _basic shit about how people worked and no, Manon, love at first sight is not the standard way people come to like each other,_ “I believe our opinion–” she felt Chat at her side, elbow casually placed on her shoulder, baton aimlessly twirling in the other “–on the subject of segregating both emotionally vulnerable and ‘predatory’ children, as I believe you’ve termed the latter once, has been made clear several times already. Neither would result in fewer akumatisations, and is likely to result in both more by number and by danger given the expected grief, hurt, and anger of their parents and the increased one of the children themselves. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that you would be able to create facilities that are completely evil-butterfly-proof unless you decide to break even more articles of the 1989 Convention than your plan already suggests.”

“Isolating emotionally vulnerable children, I’ll admit, is an idea we have given up on,” she _almost_ said ‘Hallelujah!’, but then: “As for the ones that engage actively in bullying that a reasonable person would acknowledge is highly likely to upset someone to the point of akumatisation, though, we have obtained opinions from experts on penal and juvenile law….”

Marinette was not having his bullshit. In fact, she was having none of the entire situation; her brain could only handle so much before it shut down.

Let Pourrain rediscover the wheel if he was so keen on it; from the downcast look of the mayor (whose daughter was likely first on the roll-call list for the institution in question) nodding his head beside the Prefect, it seemed like the actual authority involved was too great for them to fight against directly. She and Chat (and possibly their part-timers, if Hawkmoth decided to try for a re-run of Heroes’ Day) would be the ones to have to pick up the mess later on, of course, and she’d need to contact the Hague before that, but it would be worth it when the social backlash hit. A failure this big was going to put this man out of office and every single one of his supporters would have to hit the brakes and go back to internet trolling about ‘these damn kids’, or return to solving other impending national crises.

It would all turn into a shitfest, Ladybug knew, but she still glanced quickly at Chat, tapped two times against his thigh ( _follow my lead_ ), and hoped that, as with every other time, they would be the ones to luck out at the end.

“...and so, since we have fulfilled all the necessary requirements and have put appropriate checks and balances and safety measures in place, we are ready to start next week,” Pourrain finished, looking for all the world like the cat who got the canary.

“Okay,” Ladybug said, feeling Chat’s elbow drop from her shoulder as she unhooked her yo-yo again. “Well, it does sound like you’re all set to move forward with this and have obtained all relevant regulatory permissions to do so, therefore,” and she took this moment to look directly at the camera on her right, not even bothering to hide her intention, “there is nothing either I or Chat Noir, as _the_ two French citizens imbued with perhaps an even greater reverence for the law than most, can do to prevent you from going ahead with this. We do not support it by any means, but will not oppose it, either, for that would be going against our work ethic, which prioritises cooperation with the state.”

She turned back to face the Prefect, whose smug smile had a confused tinge to it, like he couldn’t quite understand her sudden compliance, pointed monologue at the camera, and general existence. “Now, it is quite unfortunate, but our timers–” _cue beeps; never let it be said their kwamis weren’t helpful when needed,_ “–make it necessary that we leave. I hope we do not see each other soon, Prefect,” she spared a glance to the cowering man before him, who had, by the paleness on his face, actually registered the meaning of her words, “Mayor, because I think we can all agree we have had five akumas too many these past few days to be able to enjoy the sight of each other in the next several weeks. Goodnight. Paris,” she turned to the camera again, “stay safe, stay strong, and remember: we are here for you. Always.”

Then she swung her yo-yo and didn’t wait for their replies; she could sense Chat behind her, but he said nothing aside from a quick ‘sleep tight’ before he split from her on the way home to head to wherever his was.

As she laid on her bed not ten minutes later, already drifting to sleep, a sudden thought sprung on her like a fly on honey:

They had not had their fist-bump.

For some reason, it was the only thing that day that caused her to want to cry.

(She didn’t, though, because she didn’t want a headache on top of everything else, and really, she was out like a light thirty seconds later anyway.)

* * *

Nathalie tried not to reflect too much on her life as she stood there, a packet of Stilnox and a glass of water in her hands, waiting for her boss, who happened to be (some, if not most, would argue _rather unfortunately_ ) the love of her life, to finally stop his 72-hour-marathon of emotionally traumatising the citizens of Paris in the name of obtaining two pieces of jewelry. _Wow,_ her brain usually managed to phrase that better, but while he’d been LARPing as a magical terrorist, she’d been busy with a) supporting his basic biological necessities, b) controlling the overall existence of his son, c) managing the fashion company that allowed her to do a, b, and d) taking care of her _own_ basic biological necessities, which, in light of everything else, usually just meant taking the hourly dose of soldier pills.

(If her mother had been alive – _and thank whoever there was she wasn’t_ – she would’ve been asking her quadruple Piscean daughter just _how fulfilling_ their ‘relationship’ was for that to happen, and really, she would have had to lie about the type of roleplay they did.)

Finally, a maniacal Hawkmoth was replaced by a still maniacal but obviously exhausted Gabriel Agreste blindly reaching forward for the goods in her hands. Instead of giving them to him, she calmly walked over to the mini-lair-evator, waited for him to come down in the room below, and then led him like a dog on an invisible leash to his bedroom, where she finally gave him the sleeping pills and the water. She’d learned her lesson the first three times she’d had to drag him down for the sake of him not getting a cold (and being even nastier than usual because of it) from sleeping on the floor of the lair; she wasn’t sure why he hadn’t killed her the first time she’d discovered it by accident, but there was no third miraculous to spare for Norman, Adrien’s bodyguard, and she didn’t want or _need_ more messes to clean up later. 

Gabriel, polite man that he was, thanked her for the pills, the water, and her general service. She didn’t quite understand how she’d gotten to the point where his doing so basically every night sufficiently compensated for every single piece of bullshit she had to undergo because of him, but it did (even without taking into account her salary, which, if accumulated over a year, could probably buy out the Dupain-Cheng bakery). She’d read enough Tumblr astrology posts to know what her stellium meant. None of them told her how to stop it, probably because the good ones were written, in the majority, by fellow Pisces, which meant that they either didn’t know or, maybe like her, didn’t care to get out of obviously toxic relationships. Gabriel, of course, would tell her that it was all bullshit, Capricorn that he was. Not that it mattered, she supposed, realising she was already in the spare bedroom Adrien and Norman still probably hadn’t realised she’d been sleeping (living) in for the past two years (she went there rarely enough that they wouldn’t). Whether it was astrology, her own heart, his charisma, or head trauma from that time her older sister had run her over with a bike when she’d been six, the fact was that her instinctive reaction upon seeing Gabriel Agreste five years ago during that job interview was to pledge her eternal loyalty and obedience to his every whim on the spot (in slightly fancier language and with her emotions redacted from the matter), and really, if she hadn’t regretted it sufficiently to quit by now, it was very unlikely that she ever would.

(Strangely, just before she fell asleep, she could swear she heard a cat sneeze from the room below hers, but that would mean that Adrien had somehow gotten one without either his father or her noticing. As this was nigh impossible at this point, Nathalie allowed herself to wish for peaceful dreams, even as her consistently repressed subconscious screamed at her that something _very bad_ her way came.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This early chapter release was sponsored by my somewhat first-hand but still very limited experience of how the world works and the help of the lovely MalcolmReynolds, who will be betaing this fic from now on (and may also be found on AO3 with quite a bit more Miraculous fics under their belt than me, so go check them out). 
> 
> I'm looking forward to any comments you might have to leave on this fic, as well as any theories. Was that meaningful foreshadowing at the end? How badly can the Prefect's plan go? Will either Marinette or Adrien get to sleep properly sometime in the next century? Will Nathalie get some much-needed help? Stay tuned to find out.
> 
> My Tumblr remains noirshitsuji if anybody wants to interact with me on there.


	3. les secrets plus connus sont les moins intéressants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _the best-known secrets are the ones least interesting,_  
>  because the ones least-known are the ones worth keeping.
> 
> ~~Or the most embarrassing.~~

Marinette’s alarm blared at 6:30 AM sharp. Of course it did: it was Monday, after all, though the past few days blurred together so heavily in her mind she wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been Wednesday, next Friday, or Doomsday. Still, that meant she was one weekend short on rest and behind on all of her various design commissions _along with_ the 18 pages of schoolwork she hadn’t managed to finish the night before. Not to mention the shitstorm she’d invariably have to deal with by the end of that week, because of course the Commissioner had thought to tell them they’d be starting on their **_Extraordinary Mean Kids Prison_ ** “next week” on Sunday night; for all she knew, “next week” was _today_.

Still, for all of that, Marinette could not find it in herself to feel that bad. As she calculated her math homework from last week whilst walking to school and eating breakfast (to the untrained, unused to multitasking eye, her ability to get her two hands to perform with the functionality and efficacy of five looked more miraculous than 98.23% of Ladybug’s Lucky Charms), she found herself nevertheless oddly...calm. Not the ‘calm before the storm’ calm, but genuinely content, almost like she was looking forward to something.

She realised in the middle of the third lesson what it was: Chat had promised to show up later that day so that they could arrange that date, though - and with every second thoughts such as these entered her mind like pictures just out of the darkroom of her subconscious, she felt closer to having a heat stroke - if she were to be completely honest with herself (and it would probably be healthier for her if she did it more often), if he came in her room and asked her to cancel all of what she was doing then and there, she would do it without hesitation. Her mind was too tired not to call her out on the bullshit thought that “it would be just because she just wanted to _chill_ more than anything else for, like, the next three weeks”. She wanted to chill, yeah, but she wanted to chill with _him._

And that, to her additional horror, included, ah, _watching Netflix_ , too, at some point.

It was only on the second consecutive minute of banging her head on her desk - slowly, quietly, as if in a conscious effort not to disrupt the learning process, even though Mme. Bustier had stopped watching her like she wanted to call 112 immediately weeks ago and the others had stopped staring long before that - that Marinette realised what she was doing and stopped, forehead pressed to the table.

“Marinette?” called Bustier, tone partially concerned but lacking any confoundment.

A string of incoherent, inhuman noises was all Marinette could emit. Thankfully, she’d been doing that a lot in the past few weeks, to the point that Mme. Bustier (along with every other teacher and student) had apparently ended up developing an uncanny sense about which of them meant “I’m genuinely fine, just tired” and “I’m genuinely _shit and_ tired, but I’ll deal with it”. Mme. Bustier continued with her lesson and Marinette again found herself thanking all the lucky stars in existence about whatever had tuned her ‘I may be sixteen but I am a more capable authority figure than most adults, I can and will handle everything and then some’ vibe into her civilian frequency. It was a blessing, really, under her circumstances, not having any of the adults in her life (including both her parents _and_ Fu) feeling like they could or _should_ attempt to interfere with whatever was going on with her unless she explicitly asked them to.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket: _a video about cats and...cucumbers?_ From Chat, to her civilian self; how he had managed to get her number, she would have to ask another time. The video was funny enough even on mute, but... _oh, no, that was_ **_not_ ** _a direction her mind should be going towards._

_And yet–_

She typed out “I have no words for this, except that I hope it’s not the same with peaches for you” before she could stop herself by thinking about her joke a bit more, then locked and put away her device in her bag, resting her face flat on the desk, wishing for death.

About thirty seconds later, she heard Adrien make a strangled noise - something between an alley cat being attacked by trash falling out of somebody’s window and a human being attacked by asthma - before another banging noise came. _Comrades in fate,_ she thought; she hadn’t missed earlier how purple his eyes were under all of that concealer.

(Adrien, for his part, had his sole efforts focused on replaying the _Frozen_ soundtrack in his head to avoid thinking about anything that could _physically manifest a reaction_ to the text he’d just received .)

* * *

The only reason Gabriel even got wind of the institution that imprisoned his Prime Akuma Free Real Estate Agents (which Miss Rossi did _not_ count towards by virtue of _being_ part of the Estate) was because Chloé’s anger and indignation, just like all of her other emotions, might as well have been broadcasting through the _SAIP_ 1. Ever since becoming Hawkmoth, he’d been living with a constant, low-thrumming headache - Nathalie explained that the doctors had told her it was probably from high sodium levels and very little hydration on his part, and that he should really watch out for kidney stones - which intensified every single time he detected Chloé’s emotions, nevermind that the lycée was a good 15 minutes away by _car_ from the Agreste mansion.

As to the latter - well, he’d had to pull quite a lot of strings in order to reconfigure Collége François Dupont into Lycée François Dupont, including, but not limited to: 

  * _actually talking_ with Audrey Bourgeois to convince her it would be a lot easier for her daughter if she didn’t need to establish her dominance all over again on top of preparing for her _bac_ in a new school, thus getting the necessary support from the mayor for it;
  * calling in a few favours at the Ministry of National Education – luckily, those embezzlement schemes around dualistic education Emily had been so worried would ruin him had served him well in convincing the nice gentlemen to sign all the necessary papers;
  * paying a lot of money to get all of the teachers certified to teach at a higher level;
  * _motivating all of the teachers to get additional certifications to teach at a higher level;_
  * hiring three hypnotists, one mime, and one fortune-teller from his teenage circus troupe (that he would swear on his deathbed he had never been part of, seen, or knew the existence of) to convince all of Adrien’s old classmates and their families to _not_ switch schools;
  * paying, again, a lot of money for school renovations so that the above would succeed;
  * additionally committed three arsons, arranged the murder of one silverback gorilla, and jaywalked five times a day for three weeks straight. (He had _very_ specific superstitions.)



He had done nearly all of it by himself, too. Just because fashion was no longer his passion and Nathalie ended up doing most of the hard work for the company did _not_ mean that he was incapable of successfully orchestrating various events towards a practical, definitive goal. In fact, the entire scheme had been during one of his most lucid periods in the past few years. 

Seeing the way Nooroo had been looking at him, though, one would have thought it were the opposite; the kwami ate nothing but lettuce for a week after it attempted to counsel him that _maybe he should sleep more_ and _wouldn’t it be better if he picked other kids to akumatise so that he could protect his identity better?_ (The sneaky bastard.)

(Gabriel _liked_ akumatising these kids and maybe, if he did it just a couple of more times, Adrien would finally be convinced of how childish, base, and undeserving of his attention they were, along with what dangers ( _circular logic? never met her_ ) lurked in their being such. Plus, the boy would be happy if he could stay with his friends for another couple of years, and if he went to another school, he’d make new ones along with the old ones, and then there was a high probability he’d be exposed to people who _weren’t_ of the mindset that it was justifiable to misuse ancient magical power in order to revive all-but-dead family that had all-but-died after _also_ misusing ancient magical power. He needed his son to think of him as a lover, not (just as) a terrorist, and kids these days had very non-traditional ideas about filial loyalty and toxicity and psychological abuse that it just _wouldn’t_ do him any good to meditate upon.)

All of this was to say, Gabriel had done a _lot of work_ to make sure Chloé would continue prepping his akuma victims for him for the next two years, and so, after he made a few phone calls to see what this _juvenile emotional delinquency centre_ situation was, he was _furious._ A whole institution that would prevent the best and the brightest of Paris’ youth from psychologically pushing _anyone_ over the edge?

In hindsight, the whole striving-to-break-the space-time-continuum-to-bring-the-dead-back-to-life thing ending with what looked to be the beginnings of a totalitarian regime straight out of a middle-grade dystopian novel seemed a bit...obvious. (Gabriel had plausible deniability about the sources that inspired most of the akuma he created, as well as for those that had developed his understanding of how children should work. His reading was wide and varied and he was _not_ ashamed of that, though.) Nevertheless, it was unacceptable. 

He was pretty sure that an inevitable public outrage would follow, however, and Nathalie’s ‘daily review’ (she summarised all the news for him every day because easily-assimilated bits of information were the only thing he had time for) suggested that Ladybug and Chat Noir themselves were opposed to the existence of the prison, reportedly because that just put all of these volatile kids up for akumatisation.

They were, of course, right; it was _very_ hard to seal an institution so completely so as not to let a single butterfly in, and even if Paris’ Prefect of Police (whom his sources told him was the main person behind this ridiculousness) had managed to ensure that much, he could not stop Hawkmoth from akumatising somebody from the outside, having them break-in, de-akumatising them, and then gunning for one of the more “potent” options. 

This led Gabriel to come to a very ironic but rather sound conclusion: _have the two children given up on fighting the Prefect on the idea because they thought to rely on_ **_me_ ** _to stir trouble that they could then resolve and get rid of the man in the ensuing scandal_? 

The arrogance that they would be able to stop him from taking their miraculous yet again? Outrageous. He could kill two birds with one stone by attacking the institution - achieving his goal _and_ ending that man’s entire career. _Even if I don’t manage the former this time, though,_ Gabriel thought, _I think I will still be_ **_quite_ ** _satisfied._

Monsieur Pourrain had somehow managed, through a rather unfortunate lack of foresight, to annoy both Paris’ resident superheroes _and_ its resident supervillain _,_ and _boy_ would Hawkmoth make him come to regret it.

* * *

“Ah, coconut, banana, and a touch of passion fruit! How are you doing?” André said, already half-way through the second cone of Nino and Alya’s usual. 

All of Paris knew that the man could not remember a name to save his ice cream van but never forgot a face and its associated flavour. Popular guesses ranged from photographic memory to incredibly strong sight-flavour synesthesia, but Adrien’s bet was on hidden compartments full of strictly-kept documentation on everybody’s orders that the man memorised every morning. Names were also there, but the trick of remembering it all simply seemed too impressive if _names_ were included as well; the allure of the mystery was in that singular weakness of his memory, not in its overall strength. 

“Or maybe he’s just Hawkmoth?” Nino said, reading his mind on reflex as he slid next to him on the side. Adrien was about to protest when André outright _squealed_ at seeing Marinette.

“Peach pink and mint, you’re here!...And, oh, you’ve added black sesame paste on, too!” he said, scooping up a large helping of all of the aforementioned flavours. Adrien was not sure which of the two of them – him and Marinette – wore red better; her with her dark hair or he with his blond one – but Nino was already looking at him strangely and he stopped himself before he could ask. Alya, for her part, had narrowed her eyes at her best friend, who was very obviously pretending _not_ to notice as she paid. Adrien stepped up, hoping to diffuse the situation with his order, but, well–

“Ah, and you, strawberry with black chocolate chip, blueberries, and blackberries! How happy I am to see you here again,” he says, leaning in closer while scooping, whispering the next bit so that only Adrien himself could hear: “I sense you’ve had a bit of luck, son, to no small credit of your own, so extra large for you, too, on the house!”

Adrien muttered a low _thank you_ and practically smashed the ice cream in his face for fear of dying from heatstroke. He’d make the Darwin awards, probably, first man to ever die from over-embarrassment, and yet somehow he didn’t think that would be enough to make his father proud of him.

“André the Ice Cream Man is not Hawkmoth,” he told Nino after mechanically sitting down next to him at the end of their self-formed row on the bank of the Seine. _Because if he were,_ Adrien thought, _then what he just implied is that he is_ **_fully aware_ ** _of Chat Noir’s and Marinette’s–_ his brain glitched on the proper word, leaving it blank with a ‘fill-in-later’ note attached– _and is making an active threat about it._

“Why would you think that–oh, I get it,” Alya said, diverting her suspicious gaze from Marinette (who seemed to nearly fall over into the Seine from the relief she sagged with, as if she’d been slow-roasting on a doner-kebab for the past two minutes). “You’ve been on your weird ‘X is Y’ shitposting again, haven’t you, Nino?”

“First of all, it’s not shitposting if it’s true – XY is, after all, one person–” Alya looked fully ready to smash her ice cream in his face at that, obviously regretting that they’d all declared low-hanging fruit fair game months ago and suspended all penalties for it, “–and second of all, I’m very serious about this. You never know who people _actually_ – or, indeed, _also_ – are.”

Alya rolled her eyes. It was a well-oiled roll, Adrien noted; it looked like she’d done it a thousand times in that specific way already. “Second of all, is this why you’ve been asking me weird questions about Luka lately? Are you going to spring on me that you’re _actually also_ him?”

It was Adrien’s turn to look strangely at his best friend whose face was as pale as André’s vanilla.

“It’s not André,” Marinette said, staring absent-mindedly at the water below them. Her voice took on a transcendental sort of quality which Adrien couldn’t help but associate with prophets of glory, doom, and – the weirdest association of them all, whose appearance in his head he couldn’t quite explain – late-stage childhood psychological trauma of the Oedipus type. “I think Hawkmoth may have been the man behind the conversion of the collége to a lycée. There is literally _no_ other person in this city who benefits from it being such and _Papa Papi definitely loves his kiddies too goddamn much–_ ” for someone who could have only ever possibly heard it via live-stream, she did a terrifyingly accurate impression of _Ladybug’s_ impression of Hawkmoth swooning over his akumatised victims, “–to let them leave the cocoon-nest yet.”

Alya and Nino were looking at her, apparently mildly disturbed by both her and the implication of her words. Adrien, for his part, found it hard to turn his ‘fear and anxiety reactionary package’ on, having exhausted at the ice-cream cart everything the past few days of non-stop violent psychological therapy (which was the only one he and Ladybug were ever able to offer to akuma victims, a) being sixteen and b) suffering from constant emotional migraines themselves) had not sucked out of him. So, he just let his mind slowly chew on the idea, like a cat licking itself out of hygienic (professional) necessity.

“I thought we agreed that it was probably Adrien’s father trying to keep him all tied up in one place, though?” Alya said, finally, in a semi-sincere attempt at a joke.

Marinette hummed, shrugging as she looked ready to fall face first in the water again – this time due to dissolution from exhaustion, not continuous grilling. “I don’t know, Alya, I’m just throwing stuff out there.”

Nino, meanwhile, had gained a strange, half-shit-eating, I-just-thought-of-a-really-bad-joke sort of grin on his face, and turned to look at Adrien as if to say something, then stopped, retaining the grin but adding a sort of _scared shitless_ quality to it while simultaneously growing _even paler_ than he’d been a minute ago, so that Adrien had to restrain himself from pinching him to check if he was, indeed, corporeal and not a ghost. 

Before his friend could muster up any words, though, the akuma alarm started blaring, and Adrien was suddenly pushing Nino and Alya into a street and sprinting off, shouting something about cover. He noted absently how neatly his and Marinette’s identical cry had synced, even though he’d ran into another alleyway while she’d finally face-dived into the water. He went to check up on her immediately after transforming, but there was no girl to be found, though there his lady was, cheerier than he’d seen her in, well, approximately two days and seven hours when the Prefect had had his ass handed to him by a _sticky-notes akuma of all things,_ and already in the water.

“I think I saw Marinette-”

“She’s fine, I sent her off into one of the streets,” Ladybug said, swinging her hand around. She was still smiling cheerily. If it weren’t for the anticipation of future schadenfreude in her eyes, Chat would have already called the emergency services. “Come on, Kitty, get in the water. It’ll be faster if we swim there.”

It really wouldn’t be, but Adrien couldn’t figure out a way to tell her that without focusing the crazed glint in her eyes on _himself,_ so in he went _._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 _SAIP - Système d'Alerte et d'informations aux populations;_ or, the government urgent communications system that uses syrens, a smartphone app, and possibly something else I have not read the relevant information sources thoroughly enough to know of.Back
> 
> Chapter once again beta-ed by the lovely [MalcolmReynolds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmReynolds/pseuds/MalcolmReynolds). It was further made possible by my new-found appreciation for rosé wine, the two-hour semi-useful introductory session I had on my first day of uni today, a now-working understanding of HTML in AO3, and The Fish.
> 
> Thank you for all of the reviews and kudos so far - they warm my heart; I look forward to seeing what you have to say about this chapter (before anybody asks - yes, Gabriel is the Zodiac Killer; I will, however, accept other theories either in the reviews below or on [Tumblr](https://noirshitsuji.tumblr.com/). 
> 
> (The Truth is held in this [account](https://is-nino-actually-luka.tumblr.com/), by the way.)
> 
> Otherwise, catch you all in three weeks, when Chat might _actually_ properly ask Marinette out. ~~Spoiler alert: no, he won't.~~


	4. je voudrais avoir l’air plus surpris, mais d’abord je dois arrêter de rire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I would act more surprised but first I need to stop laughing_
> 
> because life is a joke and so are all of them.
> 
> (Except for Nino. Nino's just cool.)

The prison complex (for there was little use, Chat Noir thought, in being politically correct about naming it in his head) was located some fifteen kilometers off of the center of Paris along the Seine, on the side of the river where the Forest of Sénart began. Ladybug had had the rather enchanting idea of swimming in through the sewer system, which she’d had little doubt would be connected to the river bed, but it turned out that, whatever disregard for international conventions on human rights the Prefect held, the same did not apply to environmental policies. They ended up going the old-fashioned way by swimming a bit further down, then emerging, detransforming behind some bushes, sunbathing and swapping theories about what was happening (Ladybug swore it would be Chloé’s fault again; Adrien, still somehow willing to give his childhood friend the benefit of the doubt, bet otherwise) while waiting for the kwamis to finish their snacks, and then transforming again and entering from the back door.

Once they got to the main area, though, Chat realised they needn’t have bothered - because, as evidenced by the lovely countryside landscape that opened up before them, it seemed like sometime in the intervening minutes after their swimming up to the building, but before their arrival, the akuma had already blown up half the building. He looked around, idly, wondering if he would find any dead bodies this time - there never were any, which was very convenient indeed, even if, theoretically, Lucky Charm should be able to restore them to life. Adrien couldn’t even begin to imagine what the branch of psychotherapy that would have inevitably sprung up to accommodate the needs of these people would look like; he was simply grateful they’d discovered that nobody would actually need to confront their own mortality like that extremely early on, so that Ladybug had had no cause to worry herself over it. 

(Thing was, somebody had calculated that, in over a hundred confrontations with expected mortality rates - based on akuma power, area of operation, Pluto’s position relative to that area, and amount of people in it - averaging at around 45%, the probability of nobody dying at an attack was so small it meant that either a) Ladybug had god-levels of luck, b) there was a specific _metaphysical_ reason for why nobody ever died in an akuma fight, or c) both. The latter option had so far sprouted the equivalent of one international war between different schools of philosophy, three separate cults in worship of the _Coccinelle Divine,_ and absolutely no conclusive response from either Tikki herself, Plagg, or Fu - at least as far as Adrien knew. He’d asked his kwami to tell him if he had some divinity in him that he needed to know about and had been promptly informed that his only divinity was in his holy obliviousness. _Whatever that meant._ )

Ladybug, meanwhile, had already walked over to Chloé, evidently to ask her what had happened. Chat took that as her acknowledging she’d been wrong and felt a sense of relief that he’d gambled correctly on his friend this time, refusing to (currently) reflect on the irony of the fact that he’d needed to get _lucky_ for that to happen. 

(Prolonged exposure to Ladybug’s presence increased his luck levels exponentially, along with wearing Marinette’s lucky charm. Chat wondered, sometimes, whether he’d have survived for so long before meeting either of them if he hadn’t been born the son of a fashion magnate in a powerful first-world country. Plagg had once told him levels of bad luck varied among black cats, as well as types - some got to be the inspiration behind slapstick movies, others - behind Shakespearean tragedies. He’d refused to say which of the two he believed Adrien belonged to.)

Chat Noir, knowing full well how much Chloé disliked him, stayed away from that conversation, opting to check if everybody had managed to get out (they had). He inevitably overheard bits and pieces due to the... _resounding_ nature of his civilian friend’s voice. When Ladybug left her two minutes later, the tick in her eye had already started. They’d had a rather early night with the last akuma, but one full night of sleep did not a consistently fucked up schedule compensate, it seemed, for the tick looked almost seizure-ish in its proportions. Adrien would have worried about her brain malfunctioning if he wasn’t fully aware of how much he was swaying on the spot. 

(He often wished he could regenerate nearly all of his energy through eating his favourite dish, too, though if he had to settle for camembert for that to happen, _so be it_.)

“It seems,” Ladybug started, attempting to compose her face once he nodded at her eye, “that the akuma victim is having an interesting conundrum. On the one hand, they’re mad at the institution and are very set on destroying every last bit of it–” Chat heard a window smash behind him, but didn’t duck, cat senses not flaring in alarm, “–and then going for the Prefect. On the other hand, they’re very much conscious of the fact that Hawkmoth being a threat is what landed them here in the first place, so they want to go after him, too.”

Chat nodded, turning to go with Ladybug as she continued talking while heading inside. “Last Chloé saw them, they’d been having an internal argument about it. Didn’t seem like they’d be using their generic super-strength powers again before they figured out how to get both cakes and throw a party.”

“Right,” he said, taking the lead to get them to where he could hear the victim was. “Hawkmoth wouldn’t want to de-akumatise them, but then again he can’t get the earrings and the ring otherwise unless he’s somehow gained the courage to actually face two teenagers himself.”

“Yup,” Ladybug said, cutting an ‘ai’ instead of an ‘ui’. “So, plan. If the akuma ends up being devoted to destroying this place and sticking it to the Prefect, we ‘fight’ it,” she used air quotations, “let it bring the rest of this prison to ruin, then we stop it before it gets to Pourrain, who, dumb as he is to let himself be in the spotlight of this project that a reasonable person could have predicted was akuma-inducing from 50 kilometers away, we want to keep around so that we can humiliate him in the eyes of the public and then not have anyone question our authority again. And if the akuma ends up being devoted to getting back at Hawkmoth for putting them in this situation...”

“...we tell it Hawkmoth very much _wants_ to get back at the Prefect for locking up all of his potential victims away and that this is the reason he was gunning for somebody at the complex to akumatise from the start?”

She gave him a tired but endlessly fond grin, that set off all kinds of dragonflies (he refused to grant Hawkmoth the _right_ of association with his positive emotions) in his stomach. “Precisely. And then we’ll finally be able to test if it is possible for an akumatised person to de-akumatise _themselves._ ”

He smirked back. “Throwing a bone at the academics, too? I like it.” Ladybug audibly groaned (she got the brunt of the questions from them, despite it being public knowledge that Chat Noir was the science nerd of the two of them; she’d even been invited to a conference once as a _keynote speaker_ but had had to turn it down because her gut feeling - which she’d started following religiously - had screamed _abduction for experimentation_ ). “We still get to stick it to both Hawky and the Prefect, too. One thing, though: why would they believe us about Hawkmoth being interested in humiliating Pourrain?”

Ladybug shrugged, reaching for her yo-yo. “Lucky Charm,” she shouted, a rain of hearts and bugs descending upon them. Chat picked them off of his suit as she caught the charm.

When he looked up, she was holding a red-and-black polka-dotted notebook. She flipped through it from the back to the front (a habit she shared with Marinette, Adrien noted) – a lot of pages had nothing written on them. She stopped to check out a few sentences on each, chuckling a bit in apparent confusion, but when she finally got to the cover, her eyes widened and she froze.

Thirty seconds later, she was rolling on the floor, the sounds of a dying fox emanating from her. It took Adrien a minute to realise she was laughing. When she didn’t stop for another two, he picked up the notebook, flipped through it the same way she had, seeing the funny bits and pieces, and then got to the front–

– _My Struggle: The Chronicles of the One True Wielder of the Butterfly Miraculous, Master of the Kwami Nooroo,_

_Hawkmoth_

“Is this–” Chat started to ask, but then stopped, started wheezing, and barely heard Ladybug’s answer:

“We have Hawkmoth’s _diary_ I _can’t–_ ”

* * *

Fortunately for them, the akuma victim took the last filled-in page from Hawkmoth’s diary as sufficient evidence for Ladybug and Chat Noir saying the truth about his intentions. They weren’t able to evict the butterfly themselves, but they did voluntarily smash the plastic fork that contained it (how the Prefect had been planning to prevent akumatisations while still having common meals was a mystery, though the heroes of Paris were glad that at least the kids’ _right of association_ hadn’t been completely trampled), so it was only an expert flick of the wrist and a dainty flinging of the diary in the air (after Chat had taken photos of the pages on his baton, of course) that restored peace and prosperity for another day. The paramedics came in along with the fire brigade and took away the semi-confused fourteen-year-old the deakumatisation had left behind (“Fuck Hawkmoth, all my homies _hate_ Hawkmoth–”) and so Ladybug and Chat Noir were free to slip out into the woods to look at the contents of the journal.

Once they had returned to the spot where they’d sunbathed briefly earlier, Chat opened up his baton to view the photos...and saw that there was nothing there. 

Ladybug cussed.

“Using the healing magic of Lucky Charm erased its entire existence, then, in every respect? Well, given the fact that it reverses all damages to the state before its being called, this is hardly surprising, I guess,” Chat thought out loud, settling back on the ground to look at the sky. It was a pretty sky that day – cloudless and almost as blue as Marinette’s eyes.

Ladybug cussed again, louder this time, also sitting down and gathering herself in a ball, thighs to upper body, face on her knees, hands around her shins.

“There, there, bugaboo,” Chat soothed, not like a mother calming her child, but like a friend offering up his own joint, while stroking her back. “Consider this: Lucky Charm, as far as we’ve established, entirely invents the objects it offers you. Therefore, it probably wasn’t Hawkmoth’s actual diary or thoughts in there – I find it kind of hard to believe he’d keep one, to be honest; if word got out, his terrorist aesthetic would be ruined – so we haven’t _really_ lost anything. The magic probably just typed out that in a random person’s handwriting–” one which seemed faintly familiar to Adrien, but he couldn’t pinpoint from where, “–precisely the words we needed.”

Ladybug looked up at him. She then cussed out again – not at him, he knew, but at the Meta Consciousness. 

(He was still unsatisfied with Plagg’s explanation about it, now that he thought about it – “Why wouldn’t it just also be a kwami?” - “Kid, if I had any fucking clue why certain concepts can be metaphysically condensed enough to be able to take on a physical form and others can’t, _I_ wouldn’t be around for you to ask me that.”

 _Speaking – or rather, thinking – of Plagg, though…_ )

“If we really wanted to know Hawkmoth’s thoughts in any way, however,” he started, slowly turning the idea over in his head. He sat up on his hands to be able to look at the trees – his mental laser pointer had no clouds to bounce off of. He could feel Ladybug looking at him, eyes red either from caffeine and lack of sleep, unshed tears, or just pure fury. “If we really wanted to,” he repeated, not sure for whose sake, “couldn’t we try to restore that obsolete telepathic link Tikki told you all kwamis used to have?”

He turned his head to look at her. They gazed into each other’s eyes, attempting, in Chat’s mind, to somehow split his last active brain cell between the two of them. He would’ve thought it romantic, too, if it weren’t for the fact that he could _definitely_ tell it was exhaustion reddening her eyes more than anything else now, and that she looked like the staring contest was the only thing keeping her awake.

Suddenly, though, Ladybug blinked and snapped her spine straight from the gradual slouch it had started to take on in the last couple of minutes. _Transfer complete,_ Chat thought, _we are now officially two halves of a whole idiot._

“What Tikki told me implied that they were only able to do that while floating around in space and doing their concept things in the beginning.” She looked away and started fidgeting with the grass, pulling out singular blades and tearing them up into tiny pieces. “After that, they never got around to trying to restore it physically en masse, given that they were either all together in the Miracle Box or needed as 24/7 superhero support.” She stared at the small collection of green bits in her hand. Chat wondered, idly, if ladybugs ate grass, and then mentally slapped himself for the thought. ( _Ah, the Biology test is tomorrow, isn’t it? Wonderful._ )

Ladybug opened her hands and watched the bits fall to the ground. “I could talk with Tikki, though, about trying to reach Nooroo. They nearly did it at his birthday last year, and it was apparently the only time they really _could,_ but who knows…”

“I think that,” Chat started, suddenly realising he hadn’t taken his hand off of her back yet. He felt too awkward to do it out of the blue, though, and seeing as she really had seemed to relax, (and if the stupid cicadas in his stomach would _shut the fuck up–_ ) he could continue to keep it there casually, “at this point, we’ve been relying on luck too much and for too long not to try doing something a bit more now. Plus, Hawkmoth’s been so unhinged lately with the akumas, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nooroo’s already activated the primordial metaphysical part of his subconscious just to have at least some sort of extra safe mental space from that man, so it may be easier to reach him.”

Ladybug nodded, resting the side of her head on her knees again, facing him. 

“Poor Nooroo, by the way,” Chat added, shuddering at the thought, “suffering from the world’s worst case of domestic abuse.”

“Bold of you to assume there’s anything domestic about his position,” Ladybug replied, hand tracing rapid circles in the grass. “My bets are on outright slavery with minimum nutrition and zero dignity bestowed or positive emotions in the diet. Just what Nooroo hates the most, as far as Tikki’s told me.”

“He’s had cause to find out, then?” Chat questioned, slowly dropping his hand from her back.

Ladybug raised her head from her knees again. “I mean, Plagg’s supposedly the one with all the bad luck, but Nooroo’s actually the kwami that has historically been stuck _the most_ with malevolent wielders. In fact, it happens so often bets are not on _whether_ his next wielder will be bad but _how_ bad they would be.”

“Poor fellow...” Chat said, pausing for a minute to stare off into the trees again. He could feel Ladybug’s quizzical stare. Though she’d gotten used to his visualisation tendencies months ago, his pausing mid-sentence to consider a thought still grated on her nerves, it seemed. 

“We could set up an initiative for his recovery,” he started, finally, turning again to look at her. “We won’t be telling anybody about how he’s connected to Hawkmoth’s powers and what-not, just that we have insider information that the latter, aside from emotionally damaging kids for life, is also the world’s premier researcher on attempting to find out how butterflies can be psychologically broken,” he paused, considering. Ladybug was listening to him, completely alert now. “Or, you know,” he added, quirking a grin, “we could say that I know because of my powers that he’s abusing a cat. If anything outside of the mass human suffering he’s started to inflict on a daily basis can jump-start people into action, animal abuse would be it.”

“A dog,” Ladybug said, reaching out a finger to bop his nose, “because some people think cats are evil, but everybody loves dogs. Sorry, but you don’t get to be in the centre of attention this time, kitty.” She paused, then held up her hand to stifle a giggle. “My Meta Consciousness, they will _riot._ ”

“Yeah,” Chat said, watching the tired joy on her face. (Seriously, _fuck_ these dragonflies.) “And we could name it–”

“The Save Nooroo Foundation?” 

He raised an eyebrow in response to hers. “In _purr_ fect agreement with the name, milady.”

She rolled her eyes, moving to stand up. He followed. “And here I thought you’d lost that _pun_ gent habit after not hearing you make any jokes like that over the past week.”

“To be fair, I think the staring contest we had earlier may have activated some of my brain cells, too.”

She snorted. (Their occasional split-second telepathy was nothing new; Plagg and Tikki had each explained it was completely normal, something about phenomenological synchronization bestowed by the Meta Consciousness to aid the process of balance preservation – or so, as his kwami had told him later, Tikki liked to believe. Plagg liked to play along with that assumption if it meant avoiding another one of her neurotic episodes, _but honestly, we have no fucking clue about this or anything else, kid, the only reason you two are technically spitballing it more than us is because we have way too much experience with this shit_.)

Chat Noir looked up at the sky again. “Well,” he said, stretching his hands above his head before reaching for his baton. “Shall we head off?”

Yo-yo already in hand, Ladybug smirked at him. “Yep. I’d propose a race to the Eiffel Tower, too, but I think a homework catch-up contest would be more appropriate.” _Ah, Biology test prep, too._ “So...first to finish their pile gets to punch Hawkmoth in the face first!”

“You already won the dibs on that one!” The few seconds Chat took to shout out that statement was enough for Ladybug to claim a head start. He mentally shrugged, though, donning on a smirk of his own. Then, he extended his weapon and vaulted off towards Paris, too.

* * *

Meanwhile, roughly 17 kilometres away in the city, Alya had been watching her boyfriend rub the back of his neck, then his hands together, and then twisting his hat in his arms for nearly thirty minutes now, and there was only so much pacing like an automated vacuum cleaner one could do as an exercise in empathic patience before they went insane.

“Nino,” she tried, stopping before him. “I get that you said you needed time to think through this, but I’m starting to worry.” He ceased fidgeting, then, and finally raised his eyes to hers. 

Alya had expected the anxiety, but the murderous rage lying under it surprised her. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, putting his cap back on. “I just thought...well, we always thought it was either Hawkmoth or Adrien’s dad that threw enough money to make François Dupont into a lycée, right, but what if, just – what if –”

 _Oh,_ thought Alya. She sat next to him on the bed and immediately looked out through the window opposite, choosing to fix her eyes on the tree where the swallow’s nest sat. It was like a soap opera, watching those birds – the mother tended to ignore the squabbles of the siblings, but then again she tended to ignore her children altogether outside of meals and flight lessons, and–

“Son of a bitch,” Alya muttered, turning to look at Nino instead and feeling herself matching him for trigger happiness. “We’re going to investigate,” she said, matter-of-factly. “To hell with journalism ethics and corporate and school privacy policies and what-not – we are going to dig out every last document surrounding this thing, every last secret phone call screening National Security Services are hiding away in their databases – fuck, I don’t _care_ how many laws we need to break to uncover the truth, but once we do, we’re buying one of these goddamn seasonal insect trackers scientists use and we’re _hunting him down._ Because if Gabriel Agreste really _is_ Hawkmoth, then that explains an _awful_ lot.”

“I call dibs on murdering him,” Nino said, clenching his fist.

Alya shook her head, leaning in to kiss his cheek. “I know how badly you want to, but you know we’d need to tell Ladybug and Chat Noir first – which, coincidentally, is what I’ll call dibs on. I’m sure they’d let you have the first punch, though, unless Adrien contests it, to warm that motherfucker up before they beat him to a pulp.”

Nino looked at her, fierce and determined and, oh, she _loved_ this boy. “I’m sure he wouldn’t. I’m pretty sure his bitterness towards his father has been coming out to the surface a lot more lately, but it’s still buried deeper than the feelings he’s oblivious he’s had for Marinette for at least, like, half a year now. So, he will be devastated for a bit, I get to have my go, then he’ll come to the full realisation of just how much of a scumbag his dad is and he’ll do with him whatever he wants. Within, I suppose, the constraints of domestic and international law.” Alya raised an eyebrow at that. Nino shrugged. “What? I do watch all of your livestreams, you know! And most of them lately have been Ladybug arguing with the new Parisian Prefect about human rights violations and the 1989 convention and so on. And Adrien listens to her, so I doubt he’d go for something she would disapprove of.”

“Point,” Alya conceded, “though I think that, at this point, Ladybug and Chat Noir have been put through so much hell – directly and indirectly – because of Hawkmoth that they probably wouldn’t much care in the first few moments about who does what to him, so long as they get to be the ones to bring him to the finish line of ‘bloodiest pulp of the year’ race.”

“True,” Nino nodded. “So, we’re in agreement about this? As much as I wouldn’t actually wish it upon Adrien, I have a terrible suspicion that his dad being the world’s most purple-loving terrorist is, unfortunately, the truth.”

Alya reached to open the small drawer in her nightstand to pull out a notebook and a pen. “We are. We will, however, need to prove it. So,” she clicked the pen on and opened on the first page (she went through so much stationery per month that her local store considered her the sole reason they were managing to stay afloat), “I get that you have little to no scruples about breaking the law to do so, but I do have to ask: do you, perchance, have any butterfly-tracking experience? Now that I think about it, I’m not actually sure they have trackers for insects, actually, I suspect it may be just birds that they watch out for in this way.”

As she finished, Nino turned to stare out of the window, expression pensive. “Have I ever told you,” he said, “that it was my grandfather who designed the original _Marrakech Butterfly Chair_ 1? Because, luckily for us, he was a _real_ stickler for _natural sources of inspiration._ And for sharing his passions with other people in too-detailed dinner-time lectures. With _powerpoint slides_ and pictures and _gifs_ and _–_ ”

Alya couldn’t help it; she lost it, spending the next half an hour wheezing half to death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 [Marrakech butterfly chairs](https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/529876712409876521/?autologin=true&nic_v2=1a2TxzLlE) are originally neither from Marrakech nor made out of butterflies. You know, like Constantine the Great's Edict of Milan ([which is in reality a letter by some important Roman guy or the other reporting what the big man himself allegedly-maybe-probably said in Milan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Milan#cite_note-Frend-1)).
> 
> This chapter was sponsored by my enthusiasm to leave this fic for a month (don't worry, everything's drafted until the end of the year), my latest identity crisis, the lack of stylistic consistency foreshadowed in the first author's note, the colour burgundy and, like, self-care.
> 
> Beta-ed once again by the lovely [Mal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmReynolds/pseuds/MalcolmReynolds), with French consultant for the title being [Elle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady3ellewrites/pseuds/Lady3ellewrites). Go check them both out (that is, indeed, an order).
> 
> Thank you for all the comments on this fic so far; your feedback makes my day. Tell me what you think of this chapter down below and/or interact with me on [Tumblr](https://noirshitsuji.tumblr.com/) if you want to.


	5. on n’a pas besoin de ton aide, sauf si tu as de l’eau de Javel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _we don't need your help unless you have bleach,_  
>  because it will solve at least one out of, like, 232938 problems we currently have here;  
> the rest would require a _miracle_ , though.
> 
> Spoiler alert...

Nathalie noticed her mistake too late to do anything more than pray to a god she’d renounced at sixteen after tripping on acid and reaching (an) enlightenment. (She’d forgotten her visions on the following day, but had not found it within herself to regret her actions; her mother had simply shrugged anyway, so she wasn’t under any pressure to reconvert, either.) 

She’d forgotten to lock Duusu in his cage. Duusu, who, to put it mildly, had _not_ been very _fond_ of her boss (and consequently his executive master) lately.

About three months ago, he had discovered she was in love with Gabriel (the kwami of emotions, funny that, could sense those of his own wielder) and had made a series of rather _unsuccessful_ matchmaking attempts. (Nathalie had blocked these from her memory because the humiliation contained in a single minute was enough to make her drink more wine in a night than during her average day during her Great Crisis of 2008, which had very little to do with the financial one at the time and everything to do with a general disillusionment with life, the universe, and everything else.)

That had been bad enough. What had been _worse_ had been Duusu accidentally floating too close to Adrien’s door after the latter had been told off by his father for (in regular families - Innocuous) Overstepping of Rules #352526 (something about the correct way he should be tying his shoelaces, maybe? Nathalie had stopped keeping track ages ago). Not that there had been a danger of Adrien seeing him, no – it was that Duusu had then flown into the lair, calmly stopped before Nathalie and the yet-untransformed Gabriel, and had taken exactly three seconds to compose himself before _flipping a desk out of nowhere_ and demanding to know _why the_ **_fuck_ ** _does that kid have more repressed negative emotions than_ ** _half_** _of the population in one of the biggest metropolises on the_ ** _continent?_ **

Her boss had then, of course, calmly asked them to excuse him for a second as he went to make a phone call, with Nathalie rushing to catch Duusu before he could try and catch up with the man. When Gabriel had returned, he’d calmly informed them he’d ordered a new custom-made cage for her kwami, and that had been it. 

Nathalie, though, being the person she was (and she cursed her heart every day for being softer than Adrien’s hair, which had more conditioner going through it in a year than most safety testing labs could handle), had taken to occasionally letting Duusu out of his cage to roam freely in her room, because a) she was _weak,_ and b) he was the closest thing she had to a friend at this point, so she owed him _this much_ for the constant emotional support he provided her with. She’d always follow his movements carefully so as not to let him phase through the wall, but he’d never attempted it.

Except that now, between a caffeine-and-lack-of-sleep-induced haze, 243 company reports to read through, 30 events to coordinate and catering to the physical needs of one adult man, she’d forgotten to lock him in his cage. Gabriel, yet unsuspecting of this being the case, was calmly eating his dinnekfast to her right. (“1 AM is too late for dinner and 4 AM is too early for breakfast, Nathalie, so this is what any meal in-between will be called from now on. Haven’t you ever heard of brunches? It’s the same principle. Now go wake up the chef, please,” _God, why did she love this man again?_ ). Before she could figure out if he’d react to the matter worse by finding out himself or by her telling him (she had no consistent data to predict either outcome with any certainty, but her gut – which seemed to currently be as asleep as 65% of her brain –tended to do best with decision-making in such situations with its 30% success rate), she felt a chill run down her spine. Her sole red lock of hair (the only part of it she’d never managed to undye after 2008) was standing on edge as she turned around to regale the cold gaze of her kwami. He went past her and came to float face to face with Gabriel, waiting for him to finish slurping his noodles and look up at him. Nathalie was already half faint with panic when the latter eventually did so, though it seemed that 2:53 in the morning was too early for him to immediately fully comprehend what was happening.

“I just want to say,” Duusu started, slowly, as if talking to an infant, “and this is the _only_ emotional advice you will _ever_ get from me for free, you scumbag human equivalent of a horror film, and that is that _you don’t need your wife back, you just need a therapist._ ”

Gabriel merely blinked as if trying to reboot his brain enough to process the advice. The kwami didn’t stay for a chat - he simply flew back out of the room. 

Nathalie stumbled out an apology which in her ears sounded even more pathetic than usual and ran to catch up with Duusu. He was already in her room when she did so and she took a minute to pant from exertion (her transformation compensated for _a lot_ of years of missed exercise). When she finally looked up properly at him, he was sitting calmly in his cage, having summoned a pipe in his...legs??? (she wasn’t an expert on peacock biology), of all things (they’d have to look up into the kwamis’ manifestive abilities one day, when they weren’t both running on less brainpower than was cognitively possible, she noted), and Nathalie didn’t know whether she found what had just happened exceptionally distressing, accidentally and tragically hilarious –

(“What? Don’t act like you disagree with me on this one,” the kwami said, proceeding to make small smoke rings.)

–or just completely true.

She decided to settle that internal debate (as she always did) after she dealt with more immediately pressing matters (of which there was never a shortage, thus ensuring she never settled any long-term problems; a brilliant, exceptionally sustainable system, really). What awaited her downstairs when she returned, though, was somehow worse than what she had expected: Gabriel in a thinking pose, both hands clutched in one another under his chin, was a prime signal for _shit hitting the fan in 10, 9, 8, 7…_

“A therapist,” he muttered, seemingly entranced by one of the flowers in the tablecloth (which she prayed to that same aforementioned god every day Gabriel didn’t notice was actually a cheap fake lace thing she’d bought one day while running 300 errands at the same time), “how have I never thought of akumatising one of them before? With the amount of negative emotions they absorb each day, they are the perfect targets, not to mention–” 

–then his upper body slammed on the table as he blacked out. 

Thankfully, the Agrestes had no immediate neighbours due to the enormity of the mansion and Adrien slept as soundly as if he was not in the house at all on most nights, so it was very unlikely his father’s snoring would wake anybody up.

_(Cleaning that suit will be a bitch though.)_

* * *

There were many things Adrien could be surprised by. He did not think of himself as possessing higher-enough-than-the-set-average of an intelligence to justify any cockiness on behalf of his rather impressive life experience: for all that he’d done and gone through and was still going through, there was probably someone out there who had a lot more interesting story to tell - or so he believed, at least. Sure, he was **the Messiah of Destruction** , as Plagg liked to dramatise it on the nights when his cheese was accompanied by wine and an inclination to tell some of the less horrific stories of past Chat-Noirs, but while Adrien could definitely see a pattern in the ‘always to some degree rather unenviable circumstances’ bit, he had to acknowledge that a lot of them were just ordinary people who’d happened to be in the wrong place at the right time (or, you know, the right barn visited by the untowardly generous 12 kings of–he didn’t know his biblical lore well enough to continue this thought), and didn’t believe himself (aside from all of the privileges inherent in his social status) to be that much different.

At any rate, though, while he maintained his capacity for intellectual surprise, his capacity for _emotional_ surprise, he was pretty sure, was near non-existent at this point. This, of course, meant he also stayed on top of his game in battle, where being surprised in the sense of ‘I didn’t/couldn’t have see(n) it coming and freaked out and yelled _BANANAS!_ instead of reacting on time’ would potentially be not only deadly for him but also bring about the destruction of the entire world – or whatever it was Hawkmoth actually wanted, though even if it was a red toy hammer he’d lost at sea when he’d been five, Chat would still fight him getting it because the guy was too much of a dick to deserve anything else. 

His father’s behaviour disappointed him, but did not surprise him, nor did Hawkmoth’s bullshit akuma designs, nor did the bullshit the regular bullshittiers around him spewed, and nor did any other bullshit that reality had pulled on him in the last three years (was it that many already? or was it more? kind of hard to tell from _inside_ Jumanji–), and so he thought that nothing that the Meta Consciousness could conceivably come up with would be able to actually stop him in his tracks anymore. Even Hawkmoth turning out to be André the Ice Cream Man would not earn more from him than Tired Exhale #6734 of the day, provided that Ladybug didn’t cover that for him (they’d made an unspoken pack to split their _doneness_ with the world, because it was impossible to carry it just by themselves anymore).

That being said though, he realised only after the following encounter, it seemed that good things, being as rare as they were, could still stump him. _(Traumatised? Not a cheese that_ **_I_ ** _have ridiculous amounts of stocked in my mini-fridge at home. )_

It was a half-sunny, half-cloudy day in Paris, as normal as normal weather went, and his enthusiasm for life, the universe, and the prospects of a date with Marinette was starting to wear off, so he turned on his _Professional Model Robot, Issue #3473_ mode on, deciding to get through the rest of the day on automatic smiles, vague waving hand gestures of bashfulness, and thumbs up for support. Only Nino knew how to fully deactivate him once he was in that mindset (both in the sense of ‘activate proper human mode’ and of ‘make fall to the ground in a nihilistic, unresponsive cocoon’), and Nino had taken one look at him and pulled out some left-over baklava from his mother’s batch from the night before, so Adrien was _good._

He felt his ears tingle a minute before the start of the third period and didn’t even waste a second-wondering what they meant, for it was precisely a _micromili_ second later than Lila entered the room.

‘Sorry for coming in so late today, Madame Bustier, I got held up signing photographs at the Red Cross Blood Donation campaign,’ she said, wiping her forehead with her hand in a gesture no doubt meant to showcase tiredness. _It would probably have even fooled Bustier had it not been for me and Marinette’s general respective physical appearances for the past month,_ Adrien thought, feeling the tingles go down his spine as well. It was at that moment that Lila glanced at the spot behind his back and blinked for a few moments, her smile turning to something a little bit sharper. 

Adrien turned around, nearly crashing his head against Marinette’s. It was resting on the fronts of her hands –it seemed like she’d yet again basically laid her entire torso over the table in a desperate attempt to stretch herself away from sleep. She didn’t even flinch from the near-collision. Her unfocused gaze, which appeared to have been aimed at the back of his head, now stared at the green nebula of their blackboard (which, _for the life of him,_ Adrien couldn’t figure out why had not been replaced with a _white_ one – if you’re going to be moving an educational establishment up the hierarchy a peg, might as well modernise the equipment along with updating the teaching practices, right?); Adrien thought he could see bare flickers of consciousness in her eyes, _like stars in the midsummer night_ –

 _–anyway,_ he thought, squashing Poem Idea #4738 of the week and turning back around to look at Lila, whose smile had gone from subtle, butter-knife-y, _I-could-hurt-you-but-I-prefer-seeing-you-spread-_ **_yourself-_ ** _thin-_ sharp, to entirely too obvious, meat-cleaver-y, _you know what? I want something solid for lunch,_ **_actually,_ ** and _this is_ ** _not_** _good,_ he thought–

“Oh, Marinette,” Lila chirped and he snapped around again to see the girl in question automatically jump up in a defensive stance, looking around wildly. He whipped his head around once more and _wow, it seems ‘model mode’ can be deactivated like this, too,_ and saw that Lila’s expression was somehow... _foxier_. 

The chirping in her voice became even more highly pitched, _and ow, the ears,_ “You seem so tired lately, maybe you should consider giving up some of your duties to others–”

And just before World War III started ( _because some highschool drama might as well do it if anything, not like the people in power probably had any better excuses–_ ), the inexplicable happened:

“–What, like you, Rossi? Ridiculous, utterly ridiculous, the mere _notion_ that you could be more useful than her.”

Adrien turned his head slowly to the right, only to confirm that it had, indeed, been Chloé who had said that. Chloé Bourgeois, his sort-of-now-ex-childhood friend, the one who had _never, ever willingly acknowledged_ anybody undeserving of her (ordinarily rather marginal for others) respect, much less effectively _defended_ them (not counting, of course, that one time someone from the year above had made Sabrina cry and was not seen again for two whole months–)

Marinette turned to look at the blonde, too, while Lila seemed too taken back to respond, but when she did open her mouth to seemingly fire back–

“Chloé, a children's’ charity cancelled a large macaron order this morning. I will feed you however many you want if you come to my house this afternoon. I will even let you take the rest home, too,” Adrien’s not-quite-yet-but-hopefully-soon-quasi-girlfriend said, expression calmer but also blanker than it had been a minute ago (Adrien could feel one of his nerves cinch from all of the head-whipping) as if she was not quite sure how or why she’d come to be so grateful but was nevertheless resigned to it.

“I can’t today,” Chloé replied, “but I would be able to come tomorrow. These macarons better not poison me, Dupain-Cheng.”

“They won’t.”

Chloé turned to Sabrina. “Clear up my afternoon tomorrow.” The other girl nodded, apparently just as surprised as the rest of the class. Alya was recording, no doubt for proof later that world peace was, in fact, achievable, while Nino seemed to be processing the entire thing via baklava munching, Kim was pointing and making faces at various people who were all simply staring, and Nathaniel appeared to be sketching furiously, as if he’d finally unlocked the artist’s block he’d been grumbling about for the past two weeks (Adrien did, in fact, prioritise keeping tabs on people over sleep, _why do you ask?_ ).

And Adrien? He could only stare at Chloé with an expression on his face he was pretty sure she’d stopped being able to elicit around ten years ago, when she’d somehow always been able to come up with roleplaying ideas so out-there her lack of imagination with analysis had taken him by surprise when he’d first witnessed it in Literature class.

He forced himself to follow the scritch-scratch sound and turn around to face the board, where Bustier was silently finishing writing out the lesson plan. Once she was done, she turned around and tapped Lila, who was pelting out various incoherent half-pleasant-half-degrading comments, on the shoulder. “Please take your seat, Lila. Class is about to start.”

The still muttering girl walked to the back of the class. Marinette’s chair screeched behind him as if being adjusted to fit to a normal sitting position, and Chloé sat down, head held only a bit higher than the level to which she’d risen in Adrien’s regard.

“So she _does_ hate Lila more than me, fun; and here I thought I’d need to ask her myself to check,” Marinette muttered behind him, and he elected to ignore it, _because they got to accept gift horses without looking for cavities in their mouths at least once in a hundred times, right?_

* * *

Marinette did not want to do this. In fact, she wanted to do this so little she could hardly think of things she wanted to do less. 

Losing to Hawkmoth would certainly suck, but would it have anything on the eternal humiliation she would bear in the face of invasive parental concern? After all, whatever wish Papa Papi wanted to cast, it would certainly end in absolute disaster (given how rich he must be in order to pull off turning College Francois Dupont into a lycée, there probably weren’t many things he wanted that he couldn’t get, and the rest of his problems he could _get over_ like normal people did, or develop blatantly bad coping mechanisms that required less effort; therefore choosing _magical terrorism_ as his preferred method of dealing with whatever it was that bothered him signaled a mind unstable enough to only ever be capable of fucking things up perpetually for oneself and others until the final annihilation of the universe – or something to that effect), thus limiting her and everybody else’s suffering quite severely in terms of length.

Her parents fussing over her and Chat Noir, on the other hand? Her father’s _knowing glint in the eye_ (and repeated vocal reminders) that screamed ‘I knew it, I knew it, I FUCKING KNEW IT, SABINE, YOU OWE ME TWENTY EURO’? (She would never admit that her challenge-kink was inherited from her parents, not even if she had to hand over her miraculous to preserve that secret.) His obsession with baking enough pastries to convince Chat to stay for dinner, and, eventually, _forever?_

_Her mother giving her the sex talk again–_

Better the desolate wasteland that Butter _cry_ Man had to offer, honestly. 

And yet, did she have a choice in the matter of telling them about her, ugh, a _budding relationship_ with Chat Noir? Well, technically, yes. If she wanted to relegate that task to the news outlets whenever it inevitably got first page. If there was one thing scarier than Sabine ‘Educational Mode’ Cheng, though, it was Sabine ‘You Have Withheld Essential Information From Me’ Cheng, and not all of Marinette’s skills as Ladybug or combo knowledge from Ultimate Mecha Strike III could save her then, so…

“Hello, um, yes,” she started, realising that they were already in the midst of dinner and that beginning with a greeting as an exposition was _inane._ Her parents looked up from their bowls of gazpacho, faces completely calm, already used to her mild air-headedness.

 _I need more sleep, don’t I? Well, there is certainly the Final Rest to look forward to, but before that…_

“I have something I want to say,” Marinette said, uselessly. She cringed internally even more as her mother let her spoon sit in her bowl and her father’s eyebrows creased. “I...Chat Noir invited me on a date. So. Yes.” 

She waved her hands around for good measure, forgetting to take account of the fact that she’d just been about to take some soup out, and ended up spraying thick red liquid in both her parents’ faces, on the table, and on the new carpet. _Oh, for the love of–_

“And you accepted?” her father asked, eyes rapt on her. Single droplets of gazpacho were sliding down both sides of his nose. Marinette had the sudden urge to laugh, so she did instead of confirming, hoping, in the back of her mind, that the conversation would _somehow magically go away, or be interrupted by the akuma attack #57 this month, please and thank you_ –

–When she looked up a solid minute of half-choking later, though, her father’s attention was just as focused on her while her mother, having finished wiping her face and the tablecloth off, was reaching with a napkin towards the two offenders on her father’s nose. “Yes, I accepted.” _Implicitly to all future ones as well, but we don’t need to discuss_ ** _that_** _now._ “Just, you know,” she did some more hand waving, eyeing the spoon that now rested next to her bowl. “Don’t be alarmed if we happen to make the tabloids or something because somebody spots us.”

“Ah, yes,” her mother replied, settling back into her seat. “He and Ladybug are kind of famous like that, aren’t they?”

Marinette looked at her bowl again. Then, she looked at her mother’s bowl. _No mushrooms._ When she looked up at Sabine’s face, though, it was as calm and pleasant as it was whenever a customer asked her for the 50th time _if you just wouldn’t happen to have_ some more of the custards she’d already told them they hadn’t been making in well over six months, _Michelle–_

 _I will never understand this woman,_ Marinette thought, _and how she thinks and why she considers it necessary to attack me like this. Or, you know, be confusing while I’m still psychologically so asleep I might as well be in a coma._ “Oh, well,” she voiced out loud. “Such is life, isn’t it?”

Sabine nodded, sagely, and her father choked on his gazpacho. Once her mother had given him three raps between his shoulder blades (Marinette had always known her strength as Ladybug was not _entirely_ due to the costume but _holy shit he’ll end up choking out his throat instead_ ), he said: “I am very happy to be family with you too, because you genuinely frighten me sometimes.”

“That is entirely valid,” Marinette and her mother both replied in unison, then exchanged a look. After about a minute of this, though, the former lost whatever sense she had of what kind of dominance they were fighting over and gave up. “Well, sorry for, ah,” Marinette said, waving with her hands a third time in the vague direction of the newly-stained carpet ( _I mean, could’ve been worse – red on yellow, for example–_ ), pushed her chair backwards, and stumbled out of it. “And thank you for the...food. And the understanding. I will go...”

“...catch up on homework?” her mother finished, helpfully.

“Yes, precisely,” Marinette said, raising her hands in automatic finger guns, which her dad mimicked, _and what was that meme about getting the worse genes from either parent again–_ “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” they both chorused, and the next thing Marinette knew, she was tripping over herself at the entrance latch into her room. She crawled towards the bed, no longer caring if she resembled anything three evolutionary branches within a human being, and flopped face-down, fully intent on not getting up again within the next, say, thirty hours.

“I regret this all _so much,_ ” she mumbled into her pillow.

“No, you don’t,” Tikki said, mouth sounding full (likely with the leftover lemon-and-white-chocolate cookies from earlier), and Marinette _hated her_ because she was _right._

(And then unsolicited fusion Adrien & Chat Noir daydream #253256 came and she... _didn’t hate much of life at all, actually._ )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again I am grateful to [Mal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmReynolds/pseuds/MalcolmReynolds) for betaing the chapter and [Elle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady3ellewrites/pseuds/Lady3ellewrites) for helping with the Frenchness of the title. Go check them both out!
> 
> Otherwise, this chapter was sponsored by my lingering spite about Chloé's character arc in the show, the cinnamon rolls my flatmate made, [Mae Muller](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pDgPv33DCQ), my continued amazement that [find the truth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27252598) is somehow a more popular fic than this one (I'm not biased, you're biased), and life the [ML Writer's Guild](https://mlwritersguild.tumblr.com/)'s Discord gives me (applications now open, spot the mod).
> 
> I am once again asking you to give me feedback, and here's my [Tumblr](https://noirshitsuji.tumblr.com/) if you want to interact with me there.


	6. je nage en pleine folie et toi dans la chance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I swim in folly and you – in luck,_  
>  and one of these is surely a consequence of the other, but it is not clear which.
> 
> Or, a Marichat date is set, Hawkmoth goes to a therapist, and a new record for Chloé redemption arc consistency is set.

“...You do realise how much trouble a public date would be, right?” Marinette says, willing herself to _not_ say something nasty simply because she’d been counting on Chat _not_ coming in at 1 AM to talk about their date. She wanted to do it, you must understand, _but before doing_ **_him_ ** _she wanted to do_ **_sleep_ ** _._

(...It took her a bit to realise that she’d mixed up the grammar on that one. _Or had she?_ )

“Indeed,” Chat drawled, a smile that no doubt was intended to _look_ impish (but resembled more that of a child that was extremely proud of itself for having discovered how tying its shoelaces) on his face. “I do, however, have a plan about how to hide my identity. It should save us from at least _some_ classic rom-com-plot-style murpheisms." 

Chat paused, then, and his face dropped into a more serious expression. "Plus, we can't hide it forever. I don't know why my visits to your place haven’t made it all over the news yet, given the amount of cameras in this city, the triple amount of media personnel, and my being France’s third greatest darling-man after the President and Adrien Agreste, but–" 

–Marinette glanced at the corner where Tikki was and started whistling a tune in a desperate attempt to establish outward innocence. 

She'd had to twist her kwami's little whatever-ladybug-legs-were-called with quite a few premium cookie recipes to earn them that much look, but Tikki just shook her head at her now; _there's nothing more I can do, you've avoided the inherent causality between unhealthy journalistic curiosity and the public’s love for scandal for far too long. Any more and the Meta Consciousness might decide to teach you a lesson by revealing your identities instead, and then what consolation would the cookies you are so generously offering me be?_ was what Marinette thought she could read in her eyes, and started whistling even _harder,_ until she caught Chat’s eye again, saw him furrow his eyebrows at her in cute, dumbfounded confusion, and dropped it for one of her classic ‘Adrien, please don’t make fun of me’-post-tripping-over-herself smiles. He shook his head before continuing–

“–but we’ll need to come clean at some point soon still, because that way we a) get saved a ton of discovery-related anxiety, and b) don’t let them get the satisfaction of having found us out.” Marinette found herself nodding along both physically and metaphorically to his logic. She had a limited amount of options to stick it to journalists as Ladybug if she wanted them to, ah, not go on the side of the authorities as the latter had asked them to and start a manhunt for her and Chat (though she’d sacrificed far too much for that as well, she thought, shuddering at the memory of that one _Teen Vogue_ cover she’d done last year), and badmouthing the Fourth Estate in front of Alya was not an option, so she was all in to take away whatever bit of contentedness they got from their job that she could.

Chat’s smirk appeared again, then, and she thought _oh no_ before he even– “Of course, this will also take away from the ‘spiciness’ of our romance, but I think our passion for each other,” he did a little eyebrow-wiggle at that, _are you fucking kidding me,_ “will do enough to sustain that.” 

Marinette’s face was hotter than the furnace downstairs would inevitably become in, oh, _4 hours now?_

(For some reason, the quotation marks he’d used around the word ‘spiciness’ had made her think of the first time they’d shown Adrien old Vines. His sheer awe at the discovery and subsequent grief overhearing the platform had shut down years ago had produced some expressions on his face that still haunted some of her weirder nightmares, ones that even Sandboy hadn’t managed to uncover from her subconscious. How it was that Chat had done that, she could only guess, though he had developed a tendency long ago to bring out both the best and the worst in her.)

“Fine,” Marinette said, eyeing her bed just as subtly as the previous twenty-seven times she already had, which was to say - none at all. “You have your date. Tomorrow – by which I mean tomorrow-tomorrow, on Thursday, not today, which is Wednesday – after school? Three o’clock? Or will your dad be a problem?”

Chat shrugged. “I have nothing scheduled tomorrow and nobody in the household is bothering to check on me these days anyway. All are very busy, they say, and are telling me to try and be responsible for myself _for once_ , so it won’t be a problem.” He waved his hand around in a gesture that would have been reassuring had Marinette not already been one sign of hurt on his face away from calling child protection services or cross-interrogating him about his address for a personal intervention.

“Chat,” Marinette said, tired beyond belief and yet still somehow furious in that cold, ‘protect this precious bean’ kind of way, “I don’t care if we work out as a couple or end up staying friends – say the words and the adoption papers will be settled before your father can say ‘it’s discipline, not abuse’, okay?”

He nodded and gave her a smile that looked happy but felt like broken glass in her eyes. “Don’t worry about it, princess.”

“The hell I won’t,” she growled, and he leaned backwards a bit.

“Okay,” he said, seemingly just registering how much of an exhausted mess she was, and the guilty expression on his face was almost _worse_ . “I will be going now, then, as you look like you are one nihilistic thought away from sleeping through the rest of the semester.” As he finished, he approached her and reached to kiss her cheek. Marinette had to try hard _not_ to turn towards him at the precise moment his lips met her skin.

(Tikki had already explained to her at least 50 times the biological necessity behind teenage hormones and the genetic predispositions responsible for late-onset puberty, but honestly, Marinette suspected Plagg had been influencing her kwami even then and had doubtlessly been the one to suggest that ‘horniness’ was an excellent thing for people to have, especially as a decision-making factor. That is, Marinette refused to believe that Tikki could be that chaotic on her own because she _needed_ at least one sane man, woman, or embodied metaphysical power in her life, because her own internal structures had crumbled to nearly nothing.)

Instead she stood there like a stone slab (thank the Meta Consciousness their telepathy worked and thus he knew how she really felt most of the time anyway, despite his overall obliviousness) even as Chat climbed up her bed and turned back to smile at her one last time before exiting from the skylight, managing one robotic wave of the hand. Then she turned around to look for Tikki and found the kwami already holding up a mirror to her face which displayed in full glory the dopey, lovestruck grin she’d no doubt given in response to his.

Her expression on the glass surface immediately turned blank. She still had neither the emotional nor the cognitive capacity to properly process the meaning of all of this. Her kwami visibly sighed, sagging, and then flew over to her desk to leave the mirror on there. “Oh, Marinette. You should have learned your lesson after Dark Cupid,” she said, returning to her. Suddenly Marinette could feel her head being petted by tiny paws in a fashion so caring yet admonishing it was practically motherly.

“What lesson?” she asked, already vaguely regretting the question.

“True love’s kisses were part of my romantic phase, you see, but although it passed, I never removed their power. I figured I’d make it easy for people to find and help each other out in, ah, unusual circumstances. Guess not.”

Marinette’s brain fully glitched before she could even reach the bed. _The floor it is, then,_ she thought before her legs gave in under her on the pile of blankets she’d specifically prepared in the centre of her room for such a scenario.

 _And really, didn’t that say it all?_ was her last thought before she passed out again.

* * *

Monsieur Roget was one of the most prominent psychotherapists in Paris. 

When his parents had named Roget after a famous thesaurus, they had, indeed, envisioned a medical career for him, though not one of the type he’d ended up undertaking – in fact, both had a marked disdain for anybody who had anything to do with ‘the crazy’, as they liked to call them, but believed firmly in the old socialist maxim of ‘you need to know one dentist, one mechanic, and one lawyer’ and, knowing from experience just how much trouble a single tooth could bring (in terms of financial requirements for its resolution – it seemed that the smaller it was, the more expensive said resolution got), they’d settled on dentistry for their boy. No matter how much they forced him to study biology and chemistry, though, (and be a national champion swimmer and grand chess master aged at 13), the boy had had to literally come out of a closet one day after hiding in there for approximately a week from their parental affection only to explain to them, excited trepidation in his voice and tears of both shame and forceful anger in his eyes, that he did, indeed, want to _genuinely help people overcome their emotional difficulties._

When he’d started practicing in Paris some thirty years ago, the then-young man had completely erased his last name from all existing public records, and settled on going solely by his first. (This made filling out any subsequent documentation quite interesting as a result due to the fact that, well, if he had a penny for every time a clerk had asked him repeatedly what his last name was as if he was a two-year-old, he’d have enough money to buy out any given state administration and fire every single one of these people within it.) He’d risen quickly in Parisian medical academia, wider social circles, and gossip, his equal love and disdain for Freud (which, to be fair, did not distinguish him as much as a lot of people liked to pretend it did) and his intimate understanding of the human soul (those Dostoyevski memorisation sessions had been one of the few objectively long-term useful things his parents had had him do) being incorporated into his signature therapeutic style.

This was why, Roget supposed, Ladybug and Chat Noir had selected him as the leader for their ex-akuma-victim emotional management initiative, and he was quite proud of the work he’d managed to do with the people they entrusted to him. He’d come to hold a healthy disdain for Hawkmoth, too – on the scale established by experts for measuring public opinion of the man, he came in somewhere at above-average.

Roget was thus rightfully furious when the world’s premium child-harassment enthusiast decided to take him over for whatever nefarious plot he wanted one early Thursday afternoon, after he’d had a serious of unfortunate fallouts with some of his more, ah, interesting and well-off adult customers. 

(And another failed negotiation with Mme. Sancoeur regarding taking in her employer as a patient – not because they couldn’t come to an agreement about the patient’s needs or the price, no, but because she insisted that there was no way Gabriel Agreste could ever be brought to admit _voluntarily_ he was processing any emotions whatsoever, and, well, what the hell was Roget supposed to do with that?)

“Calmman,” the malevolent bastard whispered in his ear, “I am Hawkmoth, and–”

“Yes, Hawkmoth,” Roget replied, feeling himself angrier despite his best efforts to remain, indeed, calm, _but what the Jung was_ **_up_ ** _with that sorry excuse of an akuma name?_ “I know what you want. But tell me...is it what you need?”

And for a brief, joyous second, he could swear the other man wasn’t breathing. “What,” Hawkmoth said, “is the meaning of this?”

“Oh, I don’t know, to be honest,” Roget replied, standing up from his office chair and heading to recline in one of his plush couches. “Why don’t you tell me? What brings you here, Hawkmoth?”

“I–I want you to bring me Ladybug and Chat Noir’s Miraculous, and in exchange–”

“Yes, yes,” Roget said, waving his hand around for good measure, in case the other man could, indeed, see him. “But where does that wish come from?”

“I have – that is _none of–_ ”

“–my business? Oh, but I disagree. You’re trying to bargain with me to do something you want and offering me in exchange to do something for me which will doubtlessly be of less total and shorter-lasting emotional value. I think you’re misunderstanding the situation; the one with the bargaining chips in this situation is _me_ , Hawkmoth, not _you_ , not until you can face all the reasons for why you can’t defeat a couple of teenagers whose only advantage over you is some imagination and a hell of a lot of luck!”

There was silence on the other line. Roget relished it the way children relished desserts and people who walked in the desert for a week – water, relished it in the way–

_–there was a whimper on the other end of the line–_

–only a person who’d made possibly the most terrifying criminal in world history _tremble in fear_ could. 

Roget smirked as he reached over to the cabinet under the table to take one of the last bottles of vodka he’d come to Paris with all those years ago. He unscrewed it without any effort and pulled out a small, straight glass, filling it up the brim.

“So,” he said, taking a gulp before feeling for the secret button on the side of that same table, the one that would alert Ladybug and Chat Noir on their devices of him having been attacked. _In a few minutes, though…._ “Tell me a bit about yourself.”

(When the two superheroes finally arrived, he handed his wristwatch over gladly, watching, fascinated, as the boy cataclysmed it. 

“How did you...” Ladybug trailed off, and Roget simply winked at her, shrugging his shoulders. “Trick of the trade,” he said, “though I couldn’t get him to give me any valuable information about his identity, I’m afraid, but I _do_ know he keeps a diary.” 

And somehow, despite the two teenagers in front of him wielding _literal magic, he_ was the one being stared at as if he was a wild bear on the loose, until they seemed to process his last remark, looked at each other, and burst out in a weird, uncontrollable fit of laughter. _Kids these days,_ Roget thought, pouring himself another glass after they left.)

* * *

It was surreal, seeing Chloé sunbathing on the chaise on Marinette’s balcony as casually as she would on her pool at the Grand Hotel. What was even more surreal was Marinette calmly and methodically sewing a skirt next to her in complete silence, occasionally reaching to the extra-giga-super large macaron box on her right (which was so large it only left a tiny part of the platform near the ledge to Adrien to sit-cross legged on, facing them and blinking in confusion) to blindly grab a flavour and hand it to the blonde. No words were ever exchanged; Chloé never asked for a specific macaron, but never complained about her host’s choice either, so it seemed as if she approved them all. Their telepathy was so accurate, their peace – so complete, it was hard for Adrien to believe things had ever stood anyway else between them.

He didn’t know what had prompted Chloé to stand up to Lila (and something told him he shouldn’t ask in order not to break the spell), but he thanked all the lucky stars that had ever refused him patronage for it. Marinette’s subsequent reaction he’d normally pin to shock, but she tended to carry a look in her eyes these days he knew all too well on some _buggy_ else’s face, that of a sage wizard who had lived through too much shit to be phased by inconsistent characterisation in the Meta Consciousness’s script, even if it was on their own part. 

Adrien had been allowed to sit outside with the two girls and observe live the re-establishment of their relationships since he was too fascinated to be in any danger of disrupting the process; although negotiation was basically nonexistent in terms of direct speech or action, it still felt like there was more being exchanged and bargained for than at the highest level business meetings his father conducted (which Adrien would deny having ever listened to out of boredom and a craving for human communication until the end of his days). Nino and Alya were inside, attempting to hack into the school’s database from Marinette’s computer, who, weirdly, was the only other person outside of himself with a very expensive VPN and IP protection software.

(He couldn’t understand what she could _possibly_ be trying to protect herself from - he used his for certain _work-related_ searches, sure, but Multimouse had never properly made it out to the public to be worrying about being discovered, and Hawkmoth seemed to have forgotten about Marinette’s existence entirely, so it was one of those funny little things he always meant to ask her about only for Plagg to distract him last-minute–)

Suddenly, Marinette practically _jumped up_ from her spot on the balcony and immediately started stretching her hands and reaching over her head before popping her spine, pivoting her upper-body on her waist to stretch around, and shaking out her limbs. Adrien had jumped up with her from surprise, but ended up merely staring at her doing her energiser, heart racing, somehow more mesmerised than he’d been a minute ago. He saw Chloé scrunch up her nose out of the corner of his eye when the shadow of Marinette’s arm passed over her face, but then that arm passed to the other side to be locked to her body her right one in an L-stretch, and Adrien was, again, lost in watching the other girl. 

It took him a second to feel Chloé’s stare at him and when he looked over at her, she’d slid her sunglasses down her nose and was giving him an ‘Are you serious?’ look.

He shrugged nonchalantly in reply. _Really, now, even_ **_you_ ** _would say that it could’ve been worse. No names named._

Chloé somehow scrunched her nose even more for a second before sliding her sunglasses back up and lying down again. “Dupain-Cheng,” she said, “those macarons are very good. I will take the rest back home with me.” She paused, as if carefully considering whether her next words would be worth it. Marinette hummed from beside her, still stretching, and though Adrien directed a winning smile towards the closest person he’d had growing up. 

Chloé sighed. _Friends you’ve had for more than seven years are forever, huh?_ “Césaire, Lahiffe, if you need any help accessing school files, I can call my father,” she shouted, and Adrien mentally fist-pumped. _We’ll get there in the end._

A _thank you_ chorused from the inside. Two seconds later, though (one a passing beat, another in stunned silence), Nino showed his head through the balcony and said: “Marinette, what did you put in those macarons?”

Adrien could _feel_ Chloé’s eyeroll, but Marinette, who was still somehow popping despite having already stretched for a good ten minutes, turned again on her waist to shrug at him as nonchalantly as Adrien had earlier. “What, do you think they cancelled the order for no reason?” she replied, turning back and stretching her neck to the right with a loud pop.

Chloé huffed. Nino smirked. Alya chuckled from the inside. And Marinette, she finally finished her stretch and gave Adrien a lazy, contented smile.

(Who, for his part, nearly fell backwards over the ledge as a result of that. 

And from the overwhelming love and happiness he felt.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout-out to [Mal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmReynolds/pseuds/MalcolmReynolds) for coming through again with the beta on this one and to [Elle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady3ellewrites/pseuds/Lady3ellewrites) for suggesting a much better title than what I originally had.
> 
> This chapter ~~'s questionable quality~~ was sponsored by my near-constant shivering due to The Cold, my approaching twenties, it somehow being the 4th week of December despite the calendar date being the 7th, all the fanfic ideas that uselessly beckon my name because I am still a slave to academia, the fact that I can see an end to this fic in sight, the fact that I will take whatever shot at media representation I can get ( _ex-USSR natives where you at_ ) chocolate buttons, and your lovely comments that never fail to make my day. 
> 
> Tell me your theories about how the Marichat date is gonna go or ask me about predictions for season 4 below. You can also find me on [Tumblr](https://noirshitsuji.tumblr.com/) if that's your thing. Sayonara, we'll see each other in three weeks in time for one last update before the New Year.


	7. ils vendent du Cosmic Latte à Starbucks, non?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _they **do** sell Cosmic Latte at Starbucks, right?_
> 
> because we can't have just one of us being clairvoyant, that's just _not fair._

“So,” Master Fu started, passing Marinette her teacup. “Are you here to tell me about you and Chat Noir’s relationship, or…?”

She nearly fainted right then and there. “No, but how do you...”

“Marinette, there are two primary reasons why the Ladybug and the Black Cat Miraculous have never fallen into the wrong hands,” he said and she mentally prepared herself for a spiel. 

(She didn’t know why, not like he’d ever been the type to give out information in spades; she was thankful, at least, that he didn’t also talk in riddles like some of the ‘spiritual guides’ in the movies.) 

Fu wobbled the cup in his hands while speaking. “One is that we have Tikki, _the Status Quo God,_ on our side, and the other one is that all monks are at least mildly clairvoyant, and being able to see the future necessarily entails that you have incredibly specific information about the present, like, say, which people out of the entire population of Paris are most likely to be suited to be miraculous wielders.” 

After finishing, he sipped his tea, as if he hadn’t just said something that indicated that he _could possibly_ **_maybe_ **also know…

“What about Hawkmoth, then?” Marinette asked, settling her mug down on the table before her hands started shaking so much she spilled the drink on herself.

Fu sighed, taking a prolonged sip (and eyeing his whisky cabinet in the corner) before he answered her. “Marinette, believe me, even if I could give you an alphabetical list of all possible suspects on the territory of Île-de-France, you would die of old age before you got through the letter F. Trust me, it’s better if Chat and you can find some way to follow the butterfly after battle.”

“Not like we haven’t tried that a million times already,” she muttered, dragging her fingers across the rim of her cup. “But the damn butterflies would always slip into some building or into the canals. I swear, he _knew_ we were following him.”

Fu shrugged at that. “Who knows, though, given the current rate at which he’s making akumas attack, he may be less careful than usual.”

“Point,” she says, picking up her cup again. “Although they have stopped in the past few days. Maybe he decided that getting Pourrain out of office was a big enough success to call a truce? No idea, Chat and I are just grateful he hasn’t tried to akumatise any of the mothers of the children who were detained in that institution, because _boy_ would that have been a _bitch_ to deal with–”

She stopped herself a bit too late after seeing Fu’s **Calm But Critical Grandpa Stare™**. She felt her cheeks light on fire.

“–no pun intended, though, or ever–you know what, nevermind. We already have a...trace we are following there, and Chat and I....”

“...are going on a date later today?”

They fell into a short staring match after that.

“Please stop doing that,” Marinette said, trying to get her voice to sound as stern as possible. “And anyway, I’m actually here to talk about something other than my amazingly complicated love life.”

“Oh?” he replied, raising one eyebrow with hairs that were probably older than her grandmother.

“Is there a way to activate the kwamis’ telepathic connection?”

His eyes dropped down to the swishing water in his cup. “...You want to locate Hawkmoth through Nooroo?”

“Yes,” Marinette said, picking at the table cloth, “but really, at this point we’re sort of more concerned about the ‘get Nooroo out of there’ part than the ‘stop the terrorist who wants to take our miraculous and probably wouldn’t mind murdering us to do that’ one. We even have an idea for a charity–”

“–the ‘Save Nooroo Foundation’?” Fu asked, raising his cup to his lips.

Marinette wasn’t sure which part of that action made it _look_ smug, but somehow that was _precisely_ how it came off. “I’m pretty sure the _mild_ part of your clairvoyance talent was a lie.”

He shook his head, expression turning distant and sad. “No, it’s just that you aren’t the first miraculous wielders to either suggest _or_ do it. I mean, one of the side-quests Joan of Arc’s holy struggle held that dragged a lot of people to fight with her _was_ to save him from the hands of, ah, _Satan on Earth,_ I believe was her phrase.”

Marinette blinked. “...Right.”

“It hasn’t even always been the Ladybug or Black Cat holders trying it, either. The sixth article of the _Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789_ was actually–”

“Right,” Marinette repeated, forcing him to stop. It was seven in the morning, she was on two and a half hours of sleep (because her body had started waking her up for akuma attacks of its own accord now, except that there **were** no akuma attacks to be awake for, which was quite unfortunate) and she did _not_ have the capacity for this. “Regardless, is it possible? I know you all said earlier it’s only manageable on Nooroo’s birthday, but if that’s when the link is _activated,_ then it _must_ already exist, right?”

“Right,” Fu replied. He was still fiddling with his cup, _and Meta Consciousness, who_ ** _is_** _the awkward teenager here, again?_

“...Could you maybe look in the book for it?” she prodded.

“...Yes. Yes, okay, I will.” He said, pensive. He looked up at her, then, and she suddenly saw the years in his eyes. “Be careful, Marinette. Even if we do have the Status Quo God on our side, something about this...about the matter of Hawkmoth’s identity...unsettles me.”

“ _Something wicked this way comes?_ I think that much has been clear from the start,” she quipped, then sighed; she didn’t _mean_ to have an edge, really, but it was sort of hard to keep away from it when everything kept pushing her in that direction.

Fu looked on her then, kindly, reminding her of the grandpa she’d only ever seen in her mom’s photo album. “I’m sorry, Marinette. I wish I could help you more, really, but...”

“Let me guess,” she said, “there is a one in fourteen million chance this all works out and it requires us to have the least amount of information and mentorship possible?”

He nods, a rueful smile on his face. “Bingo. The timelines change, obviously, so I try and tell you things whenever possible–”

“–which is why my guardian lessons are once in a blue Taurus moon when Mercury is in retrograde?”

He blinked. “Yes, essentially… although that is an interesting pattern that I’m not _sure_ is accurate–”

“It was a joke,” she said.

“Oh.”

That made her crack, then, that right there. She slammed her head on the table, hands curled into fists on either side and laughed and laughed and _laughed_ until–

“Alright,” Tikki said from the now-empty plate of cookies she’d shared with Wayzz, “that’s enough hysteria now, Marinette, you’ve reached your daily limit.”

“Is it that low?” Fu asked as Marinette raised herself from the table and then in turn raised an eyebrow at Tikki.

The kwami cussed. “I was _hoping_ she wouldn’t find out how bad it could get–”

“You know,” Marinette said, “I think this _is_ enough for one day.” Then she blinked again. “I still have school in twenty minutes, don’t I?”

“Yes,” Tikki replied, flying over to her purse.

“Great. Fan-fucking-tastic.” Marinette turned to Fu, who had dropped his **Critical Grandpa** posturing and was obviously trying to stifle his chuckles at her suffering. “Thanks for the empathy, _master_ ,” she deadpanned.

“Any time,” he said, grin turning somewhat shit-eating. “You just remind me of me in the good old days, is all.”

She rolled her eyes but smiled anyway. “Terrifying. Call me when you check that book.”

“Will do. Enjoy your date this afternoon,” she could _swear_ his grin grew larger as he said that.

Marinette groaned.

“You know, when I was figuring out which two people I should pick, it helped a lot that you were soulmates–”

“Nope,” she said, picking up her purse and dashing out of the massage studio at top speed at the man’s chuckles. “Not hearing it. Nuh-uh.”

 _(Why me?_ she thought as she did so.

 **_Who else?_ ** Tikki replied in her head.) ****

* * *

Their date was set to start half an hour after the school day ended. The _Starbucks_ they’d agreed on was smack-bang in the middle between Dupont and her home, so Marinette had enough time to:

  1. Dash to the bakery at top speed, avoiding embarrassing, tearful (on her father’s side) conversation #34838 about how _wonderful_ it was that she would be dating one of their resident supervillain’s arch-nemeses thanks to the afternoon rush hour. 



(All the moms who picked up their kids from school came in at precisely the same time every day – 2:32 PM, like a bunch of highly-strung clocks wound by their _love’s_ extremely loud whining. The non-regulars threw her dirty looks for ‘skipping the line to the front’, and since she was already in a mood, she gave them her **Ladybug Smile™** , forcing them to immediately feel a thousand years worth of shame for having disrespected her.)

  1. Once at home, get dressed up to some kind of acceptable ‘date’ standard involving forfeiting her usual pink jeans, grey jacket, and white blouse (when had she last put them in the laundry, again?) for a green and black combo she’d been wanting to try on for a while.
  2. Realise that she’d accidentally ( ** _or is it? -_** _shut up, Tikki_ ) dressed in Chat’s colours and spend ten minutes screaming into her pillow (her kwami’s words about true love’s kiss replaying in her mind on a highly unmodulated loop).
  3. Get up and do some make-up (mostly to try and stylise the _IKEA_ bags under her eyes).
  4. Run downstairs, now two minutes short of being late, and dash by her parents at the register at top speed again, hearing her father shout “Have fun!” and her mother “I’m too young to have grandchildren yet” and hate her life a bit more.
  5. Arrive at the cafe precisely at the same time as the Banana Man.



“Well, hello there,” he said, and even through the cursed yellow costume she could hear a smirk emerging on his face and dying as soon as he gave her a once over. Marinette had never understood what a double-take meant before this, but now she _got it._

“Hello to you, too, Chaton,” she said, realised her mistake, and put on a million-wat smile to cover the panic screeching inside her head. The smiling, empty banana face before her still seemed too taken-aback to register what she had said, which was good, and luckily there were people already starting to stare at them and taking their phones out of their pockets, so she had an excuse to a) restrain herself from slamming her head into the concrete wall next to the _Starbucks’_ front door and b) grab him by the arm and drag him inside. 

“Best to get in now, I think, people are starting to notice us,” she chirped at a frequency she wasn’t sure even he could hear. “I wonder why, seeing as the _Banana Man_ obviously goes out on public dates _every day._ How did you even–”

“He owed me a favour,” Chat replied, sounding still transfixed, but then shook his head and took the lead once they were inside the building. “Still does, actually, probably won’t repay _that_ debt any time soon.” 

Marinette _did not_ want to know. 

“Do you want to order together and then find a table or…?”

“Oh, uh, I’ll find us a table, you order. One caramel macchiato for me, please?” she said, already backing off to find a table in the corner. The weekday afternoon meant there were at least only students inside, so she didn’t have much to worry about in terms of adults, at least, but–

“–Marinette? What are you doing here?” she heard Alya say and whipped her head around to see her and Nino sitting on a table right behind her, eyes switching between her, Banananoir, and _the hands they were still holding._

“I thought your study date was on Thursday,” Marinette replied, slapping herself mentally for falling into the rom-com-style murpheism.

“Today _is_ Thursday,” Nino pointed out, then continued eyeing Chat with a sort of confused but intrigued suspicion.

Chat, for some reason, decided to pitch in just then. “Wow, really?” he said, glancing at his left wrist which, while a habit reminiscent of another unfairly attractive blond in Marinette’s life, did not really amount to much since a) _there was no watch there_ and _b) clocks don’t ordinarily tell days of the week anyway._ “So it is!” he exclaimed, turning to Marinette. “Well, ah, we could….”

“Oh, no, don’t mind us,” Alya said in that casual, accusatory tone of voice she had when she smelled bullshit. “There’s a table on the corner there,” she gestured with her head, “that has some of the plushiest couches and the best lighting. Very dim. _Very romantic._ ”

Marinette felt like there were razors being pointed at her when her friend looked at her. She smiled her million-watt smile once more and chirped: “Wow, that’s great, thanks!”

“Yeah, we really wouldn’t want to interrupt your date or anything,” Chat added, the painted smile on the front of the costume _somehow_ turning into a grimace. His hand went to his hip where his staff would usually be and then he quickly dropped it, leaning casually on one table instead. Marinette knew he only did that when he was extra nervous and needed the physical support – which, seeing as Nino’s eyes had narrowed even more and Alya seemed to be googling videos of the Ladynoir battle against Feast (Marinette cursed her best friend for instilling into her the habit of thinking of their partnership with the _shipping term_ ), she couldn’t _really_ blame him for _._

 _I should probably start praying that neither of them recognise his voice, actually,_ she thought, before realizing _she had nobody to pray_ **to**.

“Right. I’ll go sit, then,” Marinette said, pivoting and heading to the table

“Mister Banana, go with your girl, too,” one of the baristas from behind the counter shouted. “I’ll bring you your order, least I can do for your, ah, _contributions to the safety of the city_. I heard caramel macchiato for the girl, what would you like?”

Marinette could _feel_ (yeah, why the fuck _could_ she do that, by the way? Ladybug senses? The Meta Consciousness playing with her?) Chat giving the barista a wink through his costume – and somehow so could the barista herself, because she _instantly_ swooned. Some part of Marinette died at the thought that it wasn’t that their telepathy was strong but rather that he was so goddamn transparent. Then, she saw Nino’s eyebrows furrow out of the corner of her eye. 

Chat walked towards the counter. “I’d like a Java chip frappuccino–”

“–with extra cinnamon?” Nino finished.

Banananoir _froze_. “Yes. Precisely,” he said, turning around robotically to stare at the other boy. 

They held each other’s gazes for a solid two minutes before Nino looked at Marinette. Then he looked back at Chat. Alya, meanwhile, was nudging him from the side, seemingly just as confused as Marinette herself.

“Anyway,” her date finally said, “Shall we...” he gestured to the table.

“Yes,” she replied, sharing one last quick glance with Nino before Chat ushered them both to the corner.

They sat down awkwardly, like teenagers on their first date (which Marinette knew that she, at least, was, and if she’d had any doubts about Chat prior to this day – which, admittedly, maybe, some, sometimes, _when she was really worried about whether their last-ditch plan for dealing with Hawkmoth – jumping on the first train to Timbuktu and becoming beggars – would actually go through with his full and enthusiastic consent_ – none remained any longer). 

Chat continued grinning at her, a soft look in his eyes (which she _still_ didn’t understand how she knew him to be doing _through the costume_ **_– maybe she’s born with wishful thinking, maybe it’s true love’s telepathy –_ ** _that’s not even the exact meme format, Tikki!_ ), and she kept the million-watt smile she hoped could power her resolve through the rest of her day. 

(The latter, in classic Alya fashion, would likely involve an ambush in her bedroom at 21:47 at night, with the full support of Marinette’s parents, and her staring Marinette down in the same way owls stare at their mouse-victims in the night before staking them down – or made them spill all of their secrets.

Yeah, she probably should’ve told her before the news inevitably broke out, too. Her brain had probably blocked out the potential for another traumatic experience like the one with her parents, but now Marinette was sure she was going to _pay_ for her cowardice.)

Marinette felt her smile stretch to the utmost possible lip-limits. The silence reigned until a clanking of mugs alerted to the barista having brought their drinks.

“Thank you very much,” Chat Noir told the girl, his dead, happy banana eyes not moving from Marinette’s. She muttered an echo of his words.

“You’re welcome,” replied the barista, still apparently semi-melted from his earlier attention. “Is there anything else I can bring you?”

“No, thank you, we’re fine,” Marinette said, attempting to extend her mouth just a little bit more, feeling her canine poking out from it. _Damn._

“...Okay. Call me if something comes up,” the barista said, and Marinette saw her hesitate before she cautiously walked away out of the corner of her eye, like an animal watching out for danger. 

It was at this point that Marinette realised that the cafe was completely silent. She didn’t need to turn around to know there were probably quite a few people with their cameras already out, and she could feel Alya’s eyes boring into her, their telepathic link vibrating with _what the fuck are you doing, Marinette?_

“What are we doing, indeed?” Marinette muttered at Chat, whose arms moved up and down ever so slightly in a confused shrug. _It’s like you’re my mirror, woohoo–_

“If my lip splits because of this,” she said, forcing her brain to _stop_ , “that might just classify as my top injury yet.”

“What, you mean falling from Heaven didn’t hurt you at all?” Banananoir replied.

Marinette was stunned. More than stunned: she was _horrified._

The banana head in front of her finally moved. It started shaking so hard from laughter it nearly slammed itself into the coffee table from how fast Chat folded over his stomach.

“You son of a–” she managed to choke out before her words turned into giggles, then into chortling, then into _sobs._

They laughed for a good thirty seconds _at least_. By the time Marinette looked up and around, everybody else in the cafe was chatting, back to their own business. _Good._

“So, tell me about your day,” Chat said, picking up his drink and sipping a bit through a hole she only now noticed in the costume.

“Oh, the usual. School. Lack of homework. Running around like a headless chicken,” she replied, placing her hands on her cup to warm them up a bit more (one of them was still tingling, but whether it was the one he’d been holding, she refused to acknowledge even to herself).

“Mmmm, same. That on top of a bio test,” he said, taking another sip.

“Oh, we had one the other day,” Marinette said. She furrowed her eyebrows, then.

“Something bothering you?”

“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. _That’s odd. It’s not like we’re_ ** _supposed_** _to have our tests at the same time._ “What else do you have going on?” she asked instead.

Chat shrugged with forced casualness. “Oh, you know. Just my side-gig of saving the city, is all.”

“Haha,” she replied, raising her cup to her lips. When she put it down, she continued: “I have a few friends looking into who the guy who turned _François Dupont_ into a lycée is, since, y’know, his real name is probably Hawkmoth’s real name. Because. Yes.” _Words, Marinette,_ **_words._ **

Chat nodded and she figured he was probably filing that information under his mental _Tell Ladybug Later_ tab (that he’d once confessed having to her _as Ladybug_ ), which was good since half of her goal had been that he would tell Ladybug-her about it, she’d act surprised, and then they could talk about it freely.

“That’s good,” he said, running his hands over his mug. “Not like we’re having much luck with that as it is, might as well go for it. Be careful, though.”

“We will be. They will be.” 

Silence, again. **_Words._ **

“I mean, otherwise, I could _try_ and actually let a butterfly get to me when Lila inevitably tries to pull bullshit #4394839,” she added, swiping a quick glance across the room to see that Alya and Nino had already left. She felt Tikki facepalm in her purse.

“Haha,” Chat said, tone as dead as any sense of dignity Hawkmoth might have once had. They sipped their drinks quietly for another minute or so, then, before he added:

“The _point_ of this very public date, actually,” he leaned across the table, “is to signal to any and all of your potential suitors that _you’re not for the taking._ ”

“What is this, _Twilight?_ ” Marinette asked, feeling her cheeks heat up. 

Chat cracked up again. “Nah, but that line sure did work! I never knew possessiveness was your thing, Mari.”

Marinette pouted, answering before she could stop herself. “It’s not. I’ve just always been a cat person.”

Chat froze.

“Red looks lovely on you, by the way,” she said, picking up her cup to hide a smirk behind it.

“How would _you_ know? You can’t see me under this costume,” Banananoir’s smiling face muttered back. “And anyway, I’m still 7843% sure it doesn’t look as good on me as it does on you.”

 _You’d know,_ Marinette thought, and immediately regretted it as the notion turned her insides to mush.

“What, are we going to be one of those couples that flirt-fights all the time for lack of better strategies for effective emotional communication?” she replied instead, shutting her mouth tight once she realised what she’d said. _No filtering thoughts today, huh?_

“I mean,” he said, still leaning over the table, and there was both hope and near-heartbreak in his voice. “If you _want_ us to be a couple, then yeah, I don’t see how it’s going to be any other way.”

 _I don’t think I would want it any other way,_ Marinette thought. _Especially since this is what we do most of the time anyway._

Meta Consciousness, how had this boy not figured her out already? Weren’t cats supposed to be intelligent? Even _Fu_ had known to make fun of her for their _relationship,_ **_not their date._ **

_(Thanks for making him this way, anyway._ )

“I mean,” she said, taking a long, long sip before finally deciding to _woman the fuck up, Marinette,_ “not like I have any other options, anyway.”

“Bullshit,” Chat said, leaning back into the couch he was sitting in. “I know from reputable sources you have plenty of people vying for your heart.”

“That doesn’t mean I consider any of them an option, you silly cat,” she replied, hiding her face behind her mug again. “Like I said, I’m a catgirl.”

He was silent for a second, but then: “You know, I’m not sure that’s what 'catgirl' means–”

“–oh, _shut it–_ ”

But he didn’t.

(And thank the Meta Consciousness for that, too.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, happy holidays, everyone! Hope you're warm and comfortable at home. 
> 
> Fu finally showed up because he, well, _had_ to, and would you look at that, they actually went on a date! I was beginning to lose hope myself that that would happen. [Cosmic latte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte) is the average colour of the universe, by the way; I just thought it was cool and wanted to include it somewhere. 
> 
> This chapter was brought to you from the depths of Noragami hell thanks to the fact that I've actually managed to rest up during break so far, my need to procrastinate on any and all essays, Strawberry Fizzy Lances, my newly-began twenties, and the colour pink. Beta credit as always to [Mal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmReynolds/pseuds/MalcolmReynolds) and [Elle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady3ellewrites/pseuds/Lady3ellewrites).
> 
> Thank you for all of your lovely comments so far, they really make my day. Do tell me what you think of this chapter down below, or reach out to me on [Tumblr](https://noirshitsuji.tumblr.com/) if you want to.


	8. encore, avec une meilleure chorégraphie (mais tu a deux pieds gauches, ça ne fait pas de différence)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _once more, with a better choreography (but you have two left feet so it won't matter much)_
> 
> In which Gabriel plots for chaos, Nathalie plots for therapy, Ladybug and Chat Noir plot to save Nooroo (well, not really, because Marinette's too overwhelmed by her boyfriend), and Nino, Alya, and Chloé come to the end of their (less than highly illegal but definitely not fully legal) investigation of Hawkmoth's identity (plotting status: pending).

“Nathalie,” Gabriel said, slamming his hands on the table, “we need a new plan.”

Nathalie, who was herself sitting on the other end of that same table (which was conference-length not because there were a lot of employes at the Agreste mansion, no, but because everything in that man’s life was a _performance_ ), notepad and third coffee of the morning (she’d gotten up 40 minutes ago) in front of her and pen resting lightly in her hand, was inclined to agree. She technically didn’t need to take notes since he would inevitably be madly drawing all over the whiteboard he projected the powerpoints on and recording the session, but dammit, if that man wouldn’t let her show him any love any other way, you bet your _ass_ she was going to be the attentive audience-member-slash-student-slash-protégé-slash-employee he wanted.

“Indeed, sir,” she said with her usual polite, deferring, and intense neutrality and he nodded, obviously pleased with that nonsense. “Do you happen to have any ideas?” _Because I sure as hell don’t have any left that don’t involve_ ** _actually_** _going to a therapist._

(Though, given how he’d somehow managed to come out more traumatised than before after his last akuma...maybe _not._ )

“As a matter of fact,” he replied, _and oh my fucking god that anime glint is back in his eyes-_ “I have been looking into one possibility. I present to you,” and he straightened up, left hand shooting up to the side and clicking the pointer–

–to reveal a familiar face. 

“Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” he finished triumphantly. 

Nathalie nodded, making sure her eyes widened slightly in shock and horror, as if she hadn’t been the one to pull out the surveillance footage from the café last night in-between trying to rewatch Friends for the 17th time (her only remaining joy in life) and her third glass of rosé.

“Miss Cheng, a very talented designer, to be sure,” he added, and Nathalie added that praise up to her mental tally of _times he has spoken highly of bird-hat girl versus of Adrien; current result - 6:1,_ “appears to have captured the heart of Chat Noir after that terrible fiasco with her father a few months back after all.” 

He sniffled in sympathy, just a bit, like someone who definitely hadn’t been the one at the heart of said fiasco. 

(Nathalie couldn’t help but marvel at his ability to withstand cognitive dissonance). 

Gabriel’s face took on a scowl he usually reserved for the catwalks. “They were spotted at a café yesterday, Chat Noir in that ridiculous banana suit disguise anybody in Paris could have guessed was him due to the actual Banana Man’s continued insistence that he’s actually an immortal being who doesn’t need any nourishment and therefore would likely only really be _found_ dead in such an establishment.” 

Nathalie saw Gabriel’s eyes narrow as he clicked through several slides, all close-ups of the couple in the cafe. (Most of these were focused on the boy hiding under the suit, though, not just because they were trying to glimpse things from his mannerisms, but also because her boss had had his eye on that banana suit for quite a while as ‘collection inspiration’ for reasons she hoped she would _never_ understand.) Finally, he happened upon a photo of the Dupain-Cheng bakery and smirked, throwing the pointer carelessly to the table (Nathalie jumped at the sound of it slamming on the surface; it was _too many coffees in the early_ for that) before grabbing a pen from the holder at the bottom of the whiteboard and uncapping it with the flourish of an artist unleashing his brush. Then, he attacked the image, assaulting every corner of the building with scribbled notes, arrows, and the secret code he insisted on using despite there being as little possibility of Adrien disobeying his father and coming to bother him as there was of his father actively seeking Adrien out himself.

( _Man, does he need to creatively express himself more_ , Nathalie thought as she watched him doodle in more detail on some of the distorted flowers on a side building in the picture, _he could use the hobby. And the rest._

 _Hmm, art therapy_ **_is_ ** _an idea–_ )

“This is it, Nathalie,” he said, finally, and she snapped out of her favourite sleeping position, half-upright on her hand, in time to see him turn around and wave his arms around like that one time he’d fallen victim to his own akuma and had nearly tried to fly off a building (Nathalie didn’t know if the nightmares or the happy dreams she had of that event were more disturbing). “The Final Battle. The Big Finale. _My 2007 Milan Fashion Show._ ”

Nathalie nodded with all the vigour of someone who had already heard these exact three meaningless similes approximately 15390 times. “Yes, sir?”

“I will strike at the heart of French pride, Nathalie,” he said, waving his hand around as if batting away a paparazzi. “I will ignite a fire within that family that would not be quenched by anything short of complete Parisian annihilation. And while Ladybug and Chat Noir are too busy dealing with them...”

“...we will finally deuter-akumatise some civilians and give them weapons to ensure our victory?” Nathalie asked, hopeful that this time maybe–

–Gabriel’s entire expression fell in that distinctive five-year-old-being-offered-putain-for-dinner kind of way. “No, of course not, Nathalie! We’re not giving innocent people any guns. _We’ve been over this. Carnage. Is. Not. Aesthetic!_ ”

– _nope, tripped that random remnant of a moral principle,_ Nathalie thought as she desperately held back on her sigh by taking a big gulp of coffee. 

(She very much intentionally chose _not_ to think about the fact that a) she thought of his moral _principles_ as landmines and not of his moral, ah, _limitations,_ and b) he made it sound as if _she_ was the one being unreasonable for proposing standard terrorist tactics in what was already a _basically two-people magical terrorism cell,_ and c) she could almost _hear_ the sparkles around the word _aesthetic_ when he’d said it.)

Gabriel shook his head and straightened up again, hands going behind his back in his typical “I have assumed adult-appropriate levels of level-headedness and inhumanly lack of emotional response” pose (also known as the _my son malfunctioned, the instruction manual didn’t warn me they do that, I will be suing the company_ pose) and cleared his voice. Nathalie could feel chills run down her spine.

“This is going to be a very taxing mission, Nathalie,” he said, eyes serious and almost –dare she think it?– caring. “I am afraid it may take its toll on you. I will relieve you of your usual duties afterwards, and get Simon to scrub my back for me for the following two weeks straight.”

Nathalie nodded. “Thank you, sir,” and there was a small smile playing on her lips because _damn if he couldn’t soften a woman (abused beyond any union guidelines employee, potato-tomato) up._

( _With a catch like this, mom, how could I resist?_ she would think later, only half of herself – sardonically, and what was that about cognitive dissonance? Sorry, couldn’t hear it over the sound of Britney Spears’ _Criminal–_ )

* * *

Ladybug raised a hand in their standard “shut up signal” (designated as applicable across all types of planned contingency situations, ranging from accidental identity discovery to “He Who Must Not Be Named should not be hearing about this ” to “okay, we’ve antagonised this akuma enough, time to stop behaving our age and deal with this problem”) and Chat Noir instantly shut up the mouth he’d obviously started opening to say _what the hell is this set-up?_ as he’d landed on their **Meeting Balcony™.**

Ladybug gestured to him to follow her inside the sealed tent. She’d ordered one that was absolutely impenetrable by any camera, x-ray vision, and/or tracking and listening devices; there was also bug spray and a butterfly net in the corner for good measure. (No, she would never reveal her sources.) A table was set in the center, with two chairs on opposing sides and a stack of paper on top of which sat two pens in the middle of it. She sat down, took a pen and a sheet of paper for herself, and pushed another towards Chat, finally tapping her left forefinger to her chin to unlock the silence mandate she’d placed him under.

“LB, what is this?” he asked, pulling up a chair while waving the piece of paper up and down. “Do we need to sign another non-disclosure agreement for Fu on top of everything else?”

“Nope, these are for doodling,” she replied, uncapping her own pen and starting to draw up the Ghost of Ladybug Past that had haunted her latest nightmares. This week’s topic: Joan of Arc trying to explain that she had been spoken to by divinity (without specifying a countable as opposed to an uncountable noun to that effect), and that going... _splendidly._ “I thought it might do well to have something justify an avoidance of eye contact during certain parts of this discussion.”

“Right,” Chat said, and she heard another pen cap pop open, and then the faint scratching on paper. “Well, you’ve seen the news. Tell me what you think.” His voice sounded steady, but Ladybug raised her eyes to see him drawing a single, concentric black circle and _oh, no–_

“I think Marinette’s a great choice,” Ladybug said, _you know, like a liar,_ “I just don’t understand why, _in the year of our Hawkmoth the what-feels-like-thousandth_ – how long have we been doing this for, by the way? Ah, what does it matter, time is a flat circle anyway – you would decide it a good idea to take her out on a _public date,_ ” she could feel her ears burning, _she was bullshitting this so hard–_

“I thought that it was frankly better that we be discovered as a couple outside of her home,” Chat said, and the circle grew... _Shrek_ _ears?_ “Even her parents don’t know I’ve been visiting, I think, and having that get out in the yellow pages is _worse_ than it getting out that we’re going on public dates. Of course, Marinette now probably has her place watched and all, but I hear her father’s been quite good at shooing people off. He’s apparently very influential with the local neighbourhood butterfly watch.”

“Right,” Ladybug said, snapping out of her focus on the black hearts that were now dotting the space around Chat’s Ball of Doom with Shrek ears, and turned to add detail to the peasant that was about to spit on Joan’s face. “I guess that starting to visit her was just not...a good idea from the get-go, then.”

“No,” Chat said, voice suddenly a lot quieter, “but it was either that or I stay very far away from one of the two people I admire very much in my life, and I couldn’t do that.”

Ladybug’s vaguely aware of her hand stopping.

“The Banananoir costume was an _idea_ , of course,” Chat adds on, idly, and she looks up to see him sketching a face in the corner of his sheet – _her face._ “Didn’t actually think it would work that well. Worth a shot, though, and I got her to laugh, so...”

_Tap-tap-tap went the tickety-tack–_

–her brain was _not_ working.

“You, ah, really like her, huh?” Ladybug said and looked up just when Chat did so, and for a second she was completely convinced that an entire teenage eternity of concocting fantabulous lies and lame excuses was going to come undone because she was blushing so furiously he was either going to figure out her identity just from her embarrassment _or_ from how nicely it highlighted the eyes he _had just drawn with nearly 1:1 precision from memory what the fuck–_

“Yeah,” he said-sighed, and she was **doomed.**

“Okay,” Ladybug said. “Cool. Really, really cool.” _Really, really not._ “I wish you all the best.” _I really, really do._

Chat cleared his throat. “Anyway, yeah. Marinette told me she had some friends looking into Hawkmoth’s identity, by the way, might even get some results soon.”

“Cool,” Ladybug replied. “Cool.”

A few seconds passed. Then, a few more, just the faint scribbling of pen on paper. Chat’s Shrek-eared black hole had started gaining a family, and the people on Ladybug’s paper looked more real than anything that had happened to her in the past 24 hours, _and this is what a pregnant pause is, huh?_

“The Save Nooroo foundation, then?” she prompted, with all the topic-changing grace of a parent who’d just given The Talk to their teenage child.

Chat’s eyes immediately cleared up from whatever romantic dreaminess they’d been holding for the past two minutes, and Ladybug briefly wondered if kwami magic was really that strong or if the Meta Consciousness just _really, really like fucking with them too much to let this identity misery end._ “Ah, yes! I have some ideas about a campaign slogan and marketing...”

(The worst part was, his excitement was so endearing Ladybug couldn’t _not_ get entrapped in it.)

* * *

Nino shut the door behind him and walked up to place his head on Alya’s, who was sitting at her desk. He didn’t ask how long she’d been rooted to the spot there because he was sure the answer wouldn’t be one he could, in his conscience as a good boyfriend, ignore, but neither would it be one he could realistically do anything about, save subtly slide the sandwich he’d bought her in her lap. 

“Okay, what are we looking at here?” he asked as Alya zoned in on the food and started unwrapping it.

A string of incoherent noises escaped the love of his (okay, fair, very short) life as the sandwich levitated to her mouth, but there was another all-but-half-chair-person to answer his question:

“It’s finished,” Chloé looked about her, appearing even deader than Alya, but it might have just been the added shock of seeing her without make-up. “Our life’s work is finally complete.”

Nino had to blink a couple of times in order to process that. “Did you just _meme–_ ”

“Her guilty pleasure is Ladybug and Chat Noir crack videos,” Alya replied, still chewing, “she has watched every available clip on YouTube at least twenty times. She can recite them by heart.”

“Césaire,” Chloé said, evidently aiming for a deadpan but coming off just _dead,_ “I told you _not_ to tell anybody about that.”

“Nino and I have agreed to share all of our brain cells in preparation for future co-residence,” Alya told her, pushing the last bit of the sandwich into her mouth and finishing it off before continuing. “Plus, we’ve been stuck at this together for, what, ten days now, Chloé? We’re practically one and the same person. We’ve seen the same ones and zeros dance, Bourgeois, there’s no escaping it.”

“Don’t say it,” Chloe protested, still with all the zest of a zombie.

“We’re _friends now,_ ” Alya forged on, ruthlessly, like an accountant giving their 8293rd customer for the day a breakdown of their banana expenses for the past year, “and if you find that hard to deal with then maybe you should go and talk with Monsieur Roget, ‘cause this bond isn’t going away any time soon.”

Chloe seemed to choke on the last dying remains of her sense of superiority then (though, really, Nino had seen her personally forfeit it on _their_ last shift together when she’d eaten her entire large McDonalds’ fries portion by dipping them in Starbucks) before sighing and slumping over a bit more, to the point where her head nearly touched her knees. Nino let her wallow in the shattering of her own self-image for about a minute before reaching into his bag again and slapping another sandwich on the desk in front of her. She then snapped straight up and began automatically unpicking the wrapping with such delicacy one might assume she was slicing an A5 steak.

“Right,” Nino said, pulling out his own lunch. “I’ve paid Max generously for his and Markov’s services. By their standards, anyway. I have no idea how five tons of dead leaves would lead to him ‘unlock the one-in-a-fourteen-million possibility’, but I convinced my cousin to clean up his back-forest, at least, and Monsieur Damocles seemed to enjoy getting to be useful for once.”

“You hired our school principal to help you rake leaves?” Alya asked, sounding a bit more lively now that she’d eaten, and finally looked up at him. Nino had to mentally slap himself in order not to get lost into her mesmerising honey-coloured eyes– _or something like that._

“No, I requested Paris’ third-best regular superhero’s help with my cousin’s struggles to tend to his three-tenths-of-an-acre property,” Nino replied, reaching out to pick up the trash from her sandwich and bin it in the corner of her room. 

“Same difference.”

“Our class has the mayor’s daughter and two professional models, one of whom is a diplomat’s daughter and the other is the fashion world’s second-biggest-bane-after-the-mother-of-yours-truly's son,” Chloé started, in a voice a mix between Alya’s accountant voice from a minute ago and Max’s calculation mode. “You run the world’s most viewed teenage blog covering two superheroes who may or may not be our own age who are fighting against a man who sees trigger warning and goes _ooooohhh, I could traumatise somebody with this, haha jk~unless?,_ your boyfriend has a better DJing track record than half of the professionals in Paris, and all three of us have somehow managed to pool our combined spite and respective crushes on Ladybug and Chat Noir,” she looked at Nino on the last one and he _swallowed,_ “and, well, use _municipal resources,_ aka my father’s credit card, for a _counterterrorism investigation_ , and bribed our one classmate who happens to be intelligent enough to have created the first AI to ever pass the Turing test with _fallen leaves_ so that he could run past all the cybersecurity we couldn’t after spending a week doing nothing but learning coding after unsuccessfully attempting to catch butterflies for the three days prior–”

(Honestly, Nino was still kind of worried about the fact that they’d managed to hack into the _Base Adresse Nationale_ all on their own. His grandfather’s butterfly catching methods not working on magical insects that, even if not having the abilities of a kwami to phase through objects could still pretty much slip in through any given large enough hole? Less surprising.)

“–only for him to help us tie up everything and wrap all the loose ends and remaining data convergence neatly, without decrypting the final answer before sending it for us to now open and then present to our heroes, some as a hopefully convincing statement of our regret relating to our past actions,” Chloé finished.

Alya looked up from the phone she’d been texting on for the past two minutes. “I’ve booked us in for Thursday at Roget’s.”

“Well, fuck, Césaire,” Chloé replied with about as much heat as the average household freezer, “I had plans for then. I couldn’t for the world tell you what they are because the only things in my mind right now are the passcodes for the private health dossiers of a quarter of Paris’ population, but I sure as hell do.”

“You don’t,” Nino said, because he’d been the one to coordinate all of their external schedules and interactions with the outside world in light of being the only one who could not go two days without outside human interaction. Even if, much to his horror of including Chloé, he actually liked _both_ these people. “You moved everything to the week after next because you lost all hope for finishing this before then since I couldn’t tell you exactly how many tons of dead leaves there could be on a three-tenths-of-an-acre plot.”

“Yes, and I also didn’t take The Owl’s speed into account,” Chloé replied, folding her sandwich wrapping into tiny squares.

“Careful, Bourgeois, that sounded almost like a joke,” Alya said, eyes still locked on her phone. She then shut it off before looking up at the computer screen again. “Okay, it’s time to find out who this fucker is.”

Nino looked at the button that held the key to Hawkmoth’s identity, too. Even to his eyes it looked too stark, and he’d been on break for a few hours, so he imagined the two girls in front of him probably couldn’t read it. After a minute or so passed without further action from either, he was convinced it was the case

“Alright, then,” Nino said, and reached out for the mouse. Then, he slowly (director’s need of suspense) moved the pointer to the centre of the screen and _clicked._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta credit once again to the lovely [Mal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmReynolds/pseuds/MalcolmReynolds) for the overall chapter and [Elle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady3ellewrites/pseuds/Lady3ellewrites) for the title.
> 
> This chapter was brought to you by my now-submitted term one deadlines, my infinitely more term two ones, my nonexistent free time, incredible time-management skills, remaining birthday whiskey, lockdown chill, and now-deleted [Tumblr](https://noirshitsuji.tumblr.com/) app (click the link, I'm still there, just less active).
> 
> Thank you for all of the support for this fic so far and I look forward to reading any thoughts you might have on this chapter. Next update is, as scheduled, in three weeks' time.


	9. et tu es sûre qu’il n’y a pas une autre solution? je peux payer, j’ai 5.20 euro et un morceau de chewing-gum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _and you're sure there isn't another solution? I can pay, I have 5.20 euro and a piece of chewing gum;_  
>  Or, Hawkmoth's plan fails, Ladybug receives an investigation report, and Marinette comes to terms with things. Unfortunately, not in this order.

Multimouse Main (aka Marinette Original) raised her voice above the chatter. “We are gathered here today,” she stopped, threw all the ones who hadn’t shut up **The Look™,** then continued when there was complete silence:

“We – or rather, _mwe_ are gathered here today–”

“–to discuss our long-standing emotional crisis in regards to our definitely nonexistent feelings _for_ and despite our definitely existing relationship _with_ our partner in magical terrorism-fighting?” 

Main turned to her right, where one Multimouse (#21, if she recalled correctly) was sitting cross-legged on the edge of her carpet. That Multimouse shrugged. “The pun gave it away.”

“...Yes,” Main confirmed, narrowing her eyes at that Mouse, who quirked an eyebrow at her.

_Okay, so this is either the part of my brain that’s managed to avoid the fallout_ **_or_ ** _the one that has already dealt with it._

(Marinette wasn’t sure which one of these she feared _more._ )

“Question,” said Multimouse #17, and Marinette turned to see her hand up in the air as if in class, face scrunched into a very intense expression. She looked like she was nervous about being reprimanded over trying to assert something to what was, for all intents and non-philosophical purposes (Meta Consciousness, the cult of the Coccinelle Divine would have a _field day_ with this), herself.

_Since when is_ **_Mullo_** _the kwami of Call-Out Posts?_ Marinette mused. 

**_You do realise the whole ‘cat chasing the mouse’ thing had to have come out of somewhere, right?_** voiced the kwami in her head, reminding everyday-and-actual Ladybug that she was never _not_ flat-sharing her mind with a mini-god nowadays. 

_What do you mean by that?_

**Let’s just say that Plagg doesn’t take well to having ego-harming truths pointed out to him by anybody who isn’t Tikki.**

Marinette nodded and then realised she hadn’t answered Multimouse #17 yet, who had started to turn blue from apprehension. “Sorry, sorry, was, uh, having a conversation with Mullo. In my head.”

“We really don’t want to know,” chorused Multimice #3, #5, and #11.

_Ah, so these are the rational ones._ “What did you want to ask, Multimouse #17?”

“What about Adrien?”

Marinette’s brain glitched.

“What about him?” said Multimouse Other (#14, maybe, hanging upside down from Marinette’s bed _and holy shit that was dangerous–_ ). “He hasn’t shown himself interested,” _ouch,_ “and regardless, if you love two people at once it’s better to make two of you happy than stay miserable to avoid ‘emotional cheating’ or whatever, that’s what moving on _is_ for a lot of people.”

_Huh,_ thought Marinette, and then her brain glitched again.

“Uh, did you say _love_ just now?” went Multimouse #2. 

Or #1, actually, since Main was switching between counting herself as one and as zero and– _who even gives a shit anymore they’re all_ ** _you._ **

_Great, now there’s Multimouse Internal, too. Maybe_ **_she_ ** _should be Multimouse Zero, Main, Everything!_

**… Please go to a therapist. Roget’s free on Fridays.**

… _How do you even know–_

–Multimouse Second-After-Her’s voice broke through her brain fog:

“Isn’t that a bit… too soon?” 

“What do you mean ‘too soon’,” Multimouse #13 said, “we’ve known this guy for, like, what, five years now? Three?”

Multimouse #6 tapped her chin. “Yeah, has anybody managed to track the passage of time in this world, by the way? Because personally, I’m a bit lost.” 

“Regardless,” Multimouse #4 said, “aren’t you a bad omen in our culture anyway, #13? Isn’t your point automatically invalidated?”

“... isn’t _yours?_ ”

“Okay,” Multimouse Main said, shutting up everybody instantly again. “Alright. Okay.”

“Is she, though?” she could hear Multimouse #7 mutter from somewhere close by.

“I think the more appropriate question is _are mwe?_ ” Multimouse #20 shouted from the other end of the room.

“Oh, for _fuck’s sake_ **,** ” Marinette saw everybody else’s heads snap alongside hers towards Multimouse #9, who started walking up to her from her spot in the corner where she’d been exchanging half-judgemental, half-amused glances with Multimouse #10 for the past– _how long has it been, again?_

But Marinette didn’t have time to contemplate any more (ultimately useless due to their unanswerability) questions, because then Multimouse #9 stopped a meter or so away from her, raised a single finger ( _ah, so_ ** _this is the one who got the Ladybug Vibes_** ) and pointed it to Marinette’s chest like a stern teacher.

“You’ve been somersaulting around this problem for too long, Marinette,” she said, voice calm yet obviously frustrated, “and yes, I’m talking in _the_ _second person_ to you because _the rest of us literally don’t exist as separate entities outside of this Multiplication,_ so it’s not like we can advise you like this as an abstract patchwork in your brain neural signals of anything– _don’t you dare laugh at my word salad._ ”

Marinette wasn’t going to, but she saw Multimouse #15 _gulping_ over the shoulder of number #9.

“You gathered us all here today,” Multimouse #9 continued, voice suddenly going a bit lower, “because you’ve been trying to avoid facing the truth for so long you had to go and assemble all parts of yourself that you could in order to finally confront it. Well, you did win the lottery, because I do have the guts to tell it to your– _well, fuck, I guess our–_ face.” She took a deep breath, and when she looked at Marinette again, her expression had softened with something–

“You are _in love_ with your partner, okay? You’ve loved him for years, but you are now also _in love_ with him. That’s it. That’s the big thing. You’ve known it for weeks, you’ve barely even bothered denying it properly to yourself, so just–” her eyes seemed to water a bit and _holy shit– “_ Just stop putting up this _resistance,_ okay? Just. There’s no point. _There really isn’t.”_

Marinette Original stared at her for a bit. Then, she finally breathed. 

“Okay,” she said, and then reached to hug number #9, tightly, _like she should’ve been doing all along–_

“Wait, are we self-hugging? _Wicked,_ ” she heard Multimouse #12 say, and then there was the rumbling of many feet and _oh no–_

“Wait, stop–”

But it was no use; she was buried under a pile of herself faster than she could’ve protested in any even vaguely fake manner.

(She really had to stop denying herself good things.

**Yes, you really should.**

_I can’t even have an end-of-chapter thought now? Fantastic._

**Sorry. Had to reinforce it though.**

Marinette mentally sighed. _Yeah, point._ )

* * *

Sabine Cheng did not go into blind rages.

Blind rage was against everything she stood for, in fact, because she valued both peace of mind and peace between people a lot. There were certain things, however, certain unspeakable, horrifying notions and ideas and actions that churned her stomach and knitted her brow and elicited a soft ‘oh’. She dealt with this type of shock the way only a migrant with zero knowledge of the language of their host country upon arrival that had then spent twenty years mastering it and every subsequent obstacle life threw at them could: she could not let it fly by without herself flying towards the entity that had done the unspeakable thing and beat them to a pulp.

In the list of people that could elicit such a reaction was, of course, anybody who dared hurt her family. (Man, how she _wished_ she’d gone to those butterfly-catching workshops as a youth! But alas, as her mother had told her _, every bit of education mattered, even the ones for which you are very likely to never find an opportunity to later use what you’ve learned in life; those lacks of skills were, in fact, ninety-seven times out of ten what fucked you up._ ) 

Beyond that, though? Sabine was a simple woman; not simplistic, but simple in what she wanted and needed to be happy and comfortable, and simple in how easily she accepted new ideas. 

(Marinette had been astonished upon learning at school one day that it was usually the _children_ who taught their parents how to use their smartphones, _not_ the other way around, and that whatever the case, teenagers were _always_ the more active ones on social media, except for maybe Facebook.

Sabine had three times the followers her daughter had on Instagram just from her random blurry photos of Paris, and she would _never_ reveal her secrets.)

When Nathalie Sancoeur walked into the bakery that day, Sabine was already on edge from worrying over the publicity of her daughter’s relationship. The woman looked as calm and emotionless as a fish – so, about as well as usual, though the bags under her eyes had tripled in size. Sabine felt a bit sorry for her; despite her boss and her questionable treatment of Adrien, she didn’t truly seem like she possessed any more evil than the random aquatic animal.

(Except for starfish. _Do not ask why._ )

“May I have two chocolatines, Madame Cheng?” Adrien’s surrogate maternal figure asked, looking down at her tablet to check something off.

“Of course,” Sabine replied and went on to fetch them, noting absently that the woman had an accent she hadn’t noticed before. “Here you go,” she said, placing Mme. Sancoeur’s order on the counter. “That will be 5.20 euro.” 

The other woman looked up from her tablet to the paper bag, then furrowed her eyebrows and shook her head. “I’m sorry, but that isn’t what I asked for.”

Sabine blinked. “I’m sorry? What else could–”

“I meant that pastry over there,” said Nathalie Sancoeur.

She was pointing at the pain au chocolat.

Sabine’s brain _glitched_.

* * *

Marinette felt like the Ben Affleck meme. She didn’t smoke, _but maybe I should buy a packet just so that I can light one up, smoke it in Hawkmoth’s face whenever we get to beat him up, and then stub it out on his hand or something–_

“South-Westerners in Paris, you will know culinary culture or you will _perish,_ ” her mother boomed from the bakery’s roof as variously sized pains au chocolat, chocolatines, and gastronomic dictionaries flew around in the air, hitting random people with more facts about French traditional pastry-making than they could conceivably handle, resulting in KOs just from the imaginary _flavour of the pastry._

Mayura had arrived and been knocked out cold by the time Marinette had managed to slip out of her room and return after transform a few blocks away. The supervillainess seemed to be muttering something about chocolate in a faint Toulousain accent and Marinette had immediately thought _right,_ **_this_** _again–_

–Ladybug groaned as she dodged another bullet-shaped pain and sensed a baton blocking a pocket-sized dictionary aiming with the actual speed of light at her back. “Why this?” she said, letting her back fall a bit backward so as to meet Chat’s, “Explain to me, Chaton, of all the useless debates, _why the one about perfectly arbitrary linguistic phenomena? 1 _”

“Can’t be helped, I suppose,” her partner replied. Ladybug swung her yo-yo to stop a baguette the size of a bus from crashing into a bunch of school children and hurled it in the other direction, leaving her to look at her partner trying very hard, for once, to dodge the food he would regularly beg her civilian self to prepare for his less-than-nightly-but-more-than-weekly visits. “ _Tom and Sabine’s_ is not only the best bakery in Paris but also the _only_ one, so there was, statistically speaking, nowhere else that _could_ serve as a bastion of French culinary chauvinism.”

“Remind me how they became a monopoly, again?” Ladybug asked, pretending with ease that she had not participated in the scheming herself.

“Something, something, Jagged Stone patronage, fiercely competitive, incredibly talented daughter, mayor’s blessing, Chinese curses and Italian witchery, cheese, the Miraculous Cure not repairing other bakeries properly for some reason, monopoly,” Chat recited, hitting a different pastry after listing each component of their success. “Which, by the way, did you ever look into that with Master Fu?”

“Yeah, I did.” _No, she hadn’t._ “He has no clue.” _That, he didn’t_ ** _._ **

(She’d leveraged everything she could as Marinette, but hadn’t asked anything of Tikki. The kwami had just shrugged when Marinette had questioned her about the other bakeries not being repaired, muttering something about the ineffable ways of the Meta Consciousness, and that had been that.)

“Right,” Chat said, suddenly swinging her feet from under her. 

Ladybug yelped, but found her back supported by his baton-less hand, chemically-poisoned-water-green eyes (her romantic side had deserted her) staring at her with all the drama of a Shakespearean hero and all the suaveness of a Garfield. 

“Sorry, but if that pastry had hit you it would have been such a _pain,_ ” Chat smirked, _and by Meta Consciousness, she really loved this fool, didn’t she?_

“Stop flirting, you have a girlfriend now,” Ladybug replied automatically, eyeing another bread-bullet dodged on the ground. 

“I do, yeah,” Chat sighed, his pupils suddenly dilating in a weird way that reminded Ladybug of hearts beating, _and oh, not now, no time for–_

“Paris, listen to my recipe!” Pain-de-Chocolat2 shouted, retracting her pastries and breaking whatever vaguely non-platonic spell _(Meta Consciousness, why did these happen so often?)_ they’d been under and causing Ladybug to salto-jump three feet away from her partner. “First, you select eggs from the finest–”

“Hey, LB, you reckon that maybe that enormous cash register she’s been hauling around for the entire battle is where the akuma is?” Chat asked, pointing to the endless stream of receipts flowing from under her mother’s continuously typing hands. “Also, _is she charging the city for attacking them with bread?_ ”

“Wouldn’t put it past her,” Ladybug muttered, before responding more loudly: “I mean, wouldn’t be the stupidest item Hawkmoth’s ever gone with, so might as well give it a shot since we have a convenient, totally-not-Meta-Consciousness-induced plot opening.”

“Isn’t it always such?” Chat asked chirpily before swinging his baton around in that dramatic way he usually did when he wanted to appear badass for no real reason. “ _Canonclysm_?”

Ladybug felt a smirk climb up on her lips. “You just really like being thrown around, don’t you?”

“Yep. That’s my kink.”

She swung away on her yo-yo before she could choke in front of him.

* * *

Breaking that cash register was cathartic. 

Ladybug didn’t even do it herself – she simply yeeted Chat Noir from a building opposite the bakery, Cataclysm already in hand, and watched him land beautifully onto her mother (which was a string of words she hoped to never _ever_ have to think in her life again), hand smack-dab against the offending object. Still, Ladybug felt a surge of endorphins fill her and, one flick of the wrist and beautiful-in-French-but-doubtlessly-ugly-in-English deakumatisation phrase later, she was transferring said endorphins to her partner via fist bump.

“Well, that was certainly _fun,_ ” Chat said, starting towards her mother. “Marinette and I have barely started dating and I’ve already fought both of her parents.”

“Thankfully, you won both times,” Ladybug replied, aiming for more sarcasm than she managed. She caught Alya waving to her out of the corner of her eye.

Strangely, then, her heart dropped right to her knees. _Oh, no._

“I’m not sure that _thankfully_ is completely accurate there, but _thanks,_ ” she heard Chat say as if from a kilometer away. “Well, I’d ask where you took Marinette earlier, but I suspect it might be better both for my status as boyfriend and in general moral terms to check on her mom first. Tell her it’s over if you see her, okay?”

“Okay,” Ladybug heard herself replying, eyes now completely fixed on Alya, Nino, and Chloe, who were still waving at her from the shadow of an alleyway. She wanted to make a “hey kid, you want some drugs?” joke, but the fear in her throat seemed to have clogged all humour.

“Bug, what is it?” 

“Nothing, nothing, I think I might be getting called over for a _Ladyblog_ interview,” she replied, turning to look at her partner again. His eyebrows were furrowed, but she realised (due to her outstanding mental trigonometric skills and _not_ the powers the suit granted her, thank you very much) he could only see Alya from where he was standing.

“Is she going for a ‘hey kid, you want some drugs?’ kinda vibe on purpose, or…?”

Ladybug sighed. _Thank the Meta Consciousness it is_ ** _this_** _brain cell we’re sharing today._ “No idea. I’ll go check it out, you do Marinette’s mom.”

“...I don’t think you wanted to _quite_ phrase things like that–”

Suddenly, all of her fear disappeared, and she unleashed her yo-yo to whack him on the head. “For fuck’s sake, Chat–”

And then he doubled over in _laughter,_ not in _pain,_ **_the dumbass,_ ** and she found herself unable to stop herself from doing the same. _Thank you,_ she thought. Out loud, though, she said:

“Now go help your future mother-in-law before _I_ get akumatised.”

A beat of silence followed that rather naturally-spoken statement. A beet-root red partner followed that.

“Yes, yes, sure,” he muttered, turning around while waving. “See you later, Bug.”

She snorted out a “Bye” as well, and then turned around–

–ah, the minute-and-a-half long lack of anxiety was over.

(Not that she was ever really not-anxious these days, but that came with lack of sleep, trusted confidants, lying to your boyfriend and everyone around you, and having the _actual weight of the world on your shoulders._ )

_This is bad,_ Ladybug thought as she walked over with a pace the slowness of which Master Fu would be envious of. _This is_ **_Ladybuggy-senses-firing-bad._ **

All of their eyes were shining rather maniacally when she finally reached them. 

“We know who Hawkmoth is,” Alya said, but then her mouth clamped shut so hard Ladybug could practically hear her teeth clinking together. She averted her eyes, then.

Ladybug looked over to the other two. Nino’s hat was suddenly slumped over his eyes, and Chloe was busy retying her hair.

“Are you going to tell me or do I have to put forward three guesses first?” she asked, aiming for sarcastic and missing it by a long shot with ‘voice slightly trembling’.

“Gabriel Agreste,” Chloe said. 

Ladybug turned to see her hands slowly falling down from her ponytail. Her eyes were red with no blue eyeshadow around, and the sadness and the anger seemed to be battling it out quite heatedly for dominance.

“Gabriel Agreste,” Ladybug repeated. 

Her mind glitched on these two words, first together, then separately, in one of those inexplicable language-processing slumps where one’s brain went ‘why are these sounds meaningful? who gave them the right? they don’t _actually_ have meaning, you know, we just gave it to them, and only now is that fact hitting me for whatever reason, thus rendering them just that: a string of sounds1–’

–or something like that, at any rate.

“Gabriel Agreste is Hawkmoth,” Ladybug said, looking at each of them in turn, observing various levels of angry and horrified and heartbroken shifting in their faces.

“Yes,” they all muttered in a unison undoubtedly accomplished after many hours spent staring at the same wall together.

_Ha,_ Ladybug thought. Out loud, though, she said:

“Well, then.”

(And somehow, despite there being no actual statement in that sentence, all of it was a lie.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. If you want to read it that way, Marinette is basically quoting/referencing [de Saussure](https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/language-change-and-the-arbitrariness-of-the-sign/#:~:text=Swiss%20linguist%20Ferdinand%20de%20Saussure,and%20it%20is%20fundamentally%20arbitrary.) on the arbitrariness of linguistic signs.  
> 2\. _Pain from (of) chocolate_ , was the intended joke. It might not be correct French but I'd argue that it _is_ standard Hawkmoth levels of name-cleverness.
> 
> Huge shout-out to [Mal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmReynolds/pseuds/MalcolmReynolds) and [Elle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady3ellewrites/pseuds/Lady3ellewrites) for betaing the chapter and the tile, and further to Elle along with [chonkynuggets](https://chonkynugets.tumblr.com/) for inspiring Gabriel's plan and Marinette's one-man symposium respectively. What can I say, the [ML Writer's Guild](https://mlwritersguild.tumblr.com/) Discord is a wealth of inspiration.
> 
> Reading comments is my favourite past-time in the world - please let me know what you think of this chapter. Meanwhile, you can also find me on [Tumblr](https://noirshitsuji.tumblr.com/).


	10. excusez-moi, nous avons perdu nos têtes, est-ce que vous savez où on pourrait gagner de temps?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marinette has the expected breakdown, the international authorities finally take an active interest in Hawkmoth's activities, and a second Marichat date adds some spice (?) to the chapter.

It was day three already. Tikki was _tired._

Marinette groaned from the bed where she’d been splattered on her stomach for the past two hours. She flopped herself over like a créper might flop a pancake precisely at the hour mark as if having developed some idea for how long it was medically acceptable (it wasn’t) to lie on either side and groaned once again when she saw Tikki floating above her.

“Marinette, you _need_ to get up,” Tikki made her voice as stern as her metaphysically flimsy excuse for a heart could allow her (empathy for _all_ living things? _really_ ?); the soft approach had shown itself to _not_ work during either of the previous two days. “I’m pretty sure your mother’s been on a call with Roget since this morning, and the last time I saw your father he was muttering something about ‘pikes’ and ‘cats’ and ‘gather all the villagers, Sabine’!”

“Rewatching _Beauty and the Beast,_ then,” was Marinette’s only response, arm draped over her eyes; her vision had likely regressed during the three days she’d been avoiding sunlight more studiously than some of the vampire wielders Tikki had had in the past.

(Tikki didn’t know how the vampires fit into the whole of it, by the way. She could _remember_ creating them, insomuch as her metaphysically flimsy excuse for a brain could remember _anything_ from before her embodiment in the earrings, but Meta Consciousness if she knew _why_ she’d thought it would be a fun genetic mutation for the Homo Sapiens species to have. Perhaps Plagg’s ‘creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin, you know? We’re not that different, sweetcakes’ holism spiel was actually not that inaccurate. That, or he was a worse influence on her than she thought.)

“Please tell me you’re not mentally comparing me to your vampire wielders right now,” Marinette said, voice as dead as Camilla when Tikki had first met her. 

“You’re not really doing much to disprove the comparison, given that you spent two days sleeping in the space under your bed,” Tikki replied, floating closer to Marinette’s face. “Glad to know that the telepathic link’s still holding up, though, all things considered.”

“This isn’t a _jonk,_ Tikki,” the kwami didn’t even start at her chosen’s sudden spike of anger; it was the thirteenth of the day. Marinette raised her upper body from the bed, finally removing the arm from over her eyes and revealing that her sleeping bags were not only the size of Tom and Sabine’s shopping bags but were also a rather noticeable shade of red. “Adrien’s father is Hawkmoth.”

“Indeed it isn’t,” Tikki replied, letting some of her age slip into her voice. Marinette tensed again before sighing and letting her body fall back on the bed. 

Tikki’s heart broke a bit more, then, and she floated closer to her chosen’s face to nuzzle her neck. Marinette sighed again, a bit more wearily, but a bit more contentedly as well.

“I know it’s not easy, Marinette,” Tikki whispered, “but you need to get up on your feet and figure out a way to _help_ Adrien. Alya, Nino, and Chloe won’t do anything without you, they said as much, and being where he is puts him in danger.”

Marinette was silent for a minute, and then opened her mouth to say something, but was interrupted by her phone ringing – _Womanizer_ by Britney Spears started playing. 

Marinette cussed and shifted her body into a sitting position. “Ah, I still haven’t told him. This will be _fun-_ ”

She picked up the phone before Tikki could comment. After a minute of listening, she said:

“That’s great about Nooroo and all, but we have a slightly bigger problem right now.” Pause. “I know who Hawkmoth is.”

Dead silence in the room, on (Tikki imagined) the other side of the line, _in the entire universe._

“Okay, yes, I can be there tomorrow. Yes, don’t worry, I’ll be–” Marinette stopped talking only to flush so brightly red Tikki had _zero doubts_ as to whose name had come up in the conversation. “Yes, yes, we’re, uhhhh, going out later today, in fact!”

Marinette looked at Tikki, panicked. Tikki floated a bit closer and _raised an eyebrow._

Marinette huffed. “Yes, yes, of course. See you tomorrow,” and ended the call.

“What did Master Fu say?” Tikki asked, suddenly getting that queasy feeling of her ‘circumstances are converging in very odd ways and will result in a shitstorm’ creation-sense. 

(Sub-type #57, to be precise: one in a fourteen million chance things would turn out fine. _Great._ )

“He thinks he’s found some information that would help us help Nooroo, and he wants to meet tomorrow morning before school,” Marinette said, typing up another number on her dial. “Is my mom still talking with Roget?”

Tikki concentrated on the noises from downstairs for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“We’re calling him first to schedule an appointment in...when is this mess likely to be over? Five days, yes, max, movie-style.”

There was something left hanging in the air, then, and in Marinette’s face still being redder than the average tomato.

“And then…” Tikki prompted, received no response, and finished herself: “...we call Chat and ask him out on a date because the weather is as fine as he is?”

Marinette, who had just stood up and was heading to her closet while waiting for Roget to pick up, tripped and had to make a back salto in order to avoid slamming her head into her closet.

(Just because Tikki hated Plagg’s attitude doesn’t mean she didn’t respect the results it yielded, and in the end, all was fair in love and superhero-rearing.)

* * *

Nathalie shook her boss’s arm.

Then, she shook it again.

When he didn’t respond after another polite shove, she moved to stand before him, blocking his view from the three unnecessarily large screens he’d set up in his office. 

(Which remained mostly hidden during the day, as if out of some primal fear that Adrien would come in and figure out that the only reason his father would have three large purple monitors, stylised with butterfly wings on top, would be that he was Hawkmoth, which...while not an unreasonable assumption, and while also entirely right, still left room for excuses of the ‘actually, I got into magical girl shows after your example and have been hiding it all along, son’ type.

 _...Yeah, no, on second thought, he’d be found out immediately._ )

“Sir,” Nathalie said. No movement registered in either his eyes or posture. “ _Sir_.”

Still no response. Nathalie opened her phone and flipped through her **Gabriel Agreste Maintenance Manual, v. 2.0.5** (to whom she was pretending she didn’t have it memorised was unclear even to herself), located the necessary paragraph (“Complete unresponsiveness to gentle prodding and careful reprimand”) and sighed once she saw what she’d already known. She closed the manual and put her phone back into her pocket, then moved to stand five meters to her boss’s right again.

Then, she charged.

Nathalie wasn’t aware what deep-seated trauma necessitated that the only way for Gabriel Agreste to snap out of a catatonic state was to be tackled to the ground, but here she was, breathing heavily, pinning the man who couldn’t conceivably ruin her more if he tried (though he might _well_ try) and watching him regain full alertness by slowly blinking in the small spark of insanity that had drawn her in all these years ago.

 _What the fuck is my life?_ Nathalie asked herself, feeling her cheeks light on fire. Then, she propped herself up quickly, running her hands over her suit before offering her boss a hand. He stared at her palm, then up at her, then got up on his own.

His gaze unnerved her. He was never this focused on her.

Nathalie coughed. 

“Sir, you’d been standing there for at least three hours watching every second of that conference now, and you’ve barely been away from the screen in the past four days because of it. I became concerned about your eye health.” _And your legs. And your goddamn_ **mind** , which might be a bit of a moot, though, I guess.

“Thank you, Nathalie,” Gabriel replied, smooth and calm like a ship’s sails in perfect weather.

“The UNESCO World Heritage Committee is furious,” Nathalie said, forcing herself to focus on putting words out as opposed to watching him watch her as if he’d just discovered she existed. “Or, well, highly frustrated, rather; the _French delegation_ to the UN General Assembly is furious. And they’re demanding that action be taken to preserve the dignity of France’s most important cultural legacy: food, even though the chocolatine thing has nothing to do with the actual World Heritage object itself.”

Gabriel blinked again before shaking his head, the spark in his eyes fully lighting up and one of his _if somebody sees me in the street like this, they’ll definitely figure out I’m Hawkmoth_ smiles. 

“Just as I planned, then,” he said, extending his arms to the side in a pose reminiscent of a Disney villain. 

(Nathalie thought she’d gotten rid of _all_ the CDs...unless he’d bent down and finally got a Disney+ subscription? At any rate, she needed to intercept his supply and _soon._ )

“The General Assembly of the UN is over tomorrow. Once nothing gets done – and there will _definitely_ be nothing done, there’s too little time for that – the wave of anger and disillusionment with both international cooperation and the integrity of French cuisine and the people that emerges...will bring us the perfect storm needed for our strongest akuma yet!” 

He laughed, then, thunder magically booming behind him despite the clear blue skies outside (shit, she thought that she’d hidden the sound machine well enough, too). Luckily, he soon ran out of breath, so Nathalie was spared one of his ten-minute dramatic performances. As he panted, though, he managed to grit out a phrase she’d already heard a thousand times and yet still made her shiver every time:

“Mark my words, Nathalie, _nothing will stand in my way_.”

And then he collapsed due to sleep deprivation. 

Nathalie sighed, bracing herself to carry him over to his bedroom again, already spinning a story that she could somehow feed his very perceptive doctor. She didn’t want the guy to figure it out – not because she personally minded the whole mess ending, but because the last ten times that had happened, well...

* * *

Marinette saltoed over the bench, completely forgetting that her cat boy (she would start thinking of him as her boyfriend, as Fu had so plainly, obtrusively, and completely correctly put it – in whatever hell Hawkmoth’s former human dignity rested, which was unlikely any one hell she’d be accessing in the next once in a while) had not seen her, or indeed, known her capable of such a feat. She hit the ground running, desperately hoping he was too into the parkour to notice.

He wasn’t.

“Marinette,” his voice had the slightest pant in it, but also a strange waver that was half horror, half admiration. “This is the third time you’ve nearly given me a heart attack in the past twenty minutes. I was aware of the fact that you had to be doing some form of exercise because your biceps are too big for your only work-out to be sewing–”

“–have you been ogling me?” she said, vaulting over another bench, desperate for a distraction.

It didn’t work. “Not the point, and don’t act like you’ve never checked me out,” Chat replied, flipping over a toddler’s crib as he did so. “Where did you get those skills?”

“Running away from akumas all the time teaches you stuff.” Technically not a lie.

“Yeah, I know, but–”

Marinette zig-zagged in front of him before digging her heels in, letting him slam into her back. For some reason, she’d thought that that would only result in his falling backwards on his ass; since that wasn’t how physics worked, they both tumbled forward instead.

“Ouch,” she said, neutrally, as if she hadn’t been the one to instigate this situation. Chat groaned from his position over her, and she felt the weight at her back remove itself only to flop next to her on the bridge. 

It was deserted now, the civilians (not that Marinette herself wasn’t one such right now, but she felt more Ladybug than Marinette at that moment) having gotten the hint to scatter away. They’d started their sprint on the other side of the river and had ended up halfway through the bridge. Only André and his ice cream cart were left, at the other end of it.

“What’s the matter?” Chat asked, no hint of judgement in his voice. Marinette shook her head from where she lay on her stomach. “That’s not very reassuring, you know.”

“I know,” she said, sighing. “It’s just... _okay_ .” _Half a lie, I can make it only half a lie._ “I’ve been thinking...since my friends have been looking for Hawkmoth, that I’ve always assumed he would be some Disney-esque villain in his castle hidden underwater in the Seine, but then I thought...what if he was somebody I knew? Or...the parent of somebody I knew?”

Chat didn’t reply. Marinette flipped herself to lie on her back as well, and felt a hand clasp on top of hers. She looked over to him.

“LB and I,” he started, staring at the clear sky above them, then paused. Marinette turned her head to look at the small white clouds making their way through the vast blue expanse, feeling the hard wood on her back.

“We’ve always thought it was a possibility,” Chat said, slowly, his thumb circling the knuckle of her own, “that it might be somebody from _Dupont_. Stuff’s been aligning too well for it not to be.”

Marinette already knew that. It was a running joke of sorts, of the ‘i need to minimise this with humour because the possibility itself is terrifying’ variety. She thought she could hear the distant sound of André’s cart moving off from the bridge, and then remembered the last time they’d been there with–

– _Nino’s been suspecting it since then, hasn’t he? Shit._

“But even if it is the case,” Chat continued, and she squeezed his fingers, “we’ll–we’ll all deal with it, together. We have Mr. Roget for that, too, and your entire class is pretty tight, from what I’ve seen. I know this isn’t really reassuring either, but...” 

Marinette felt the weight next to her shift and she turned her head to the left again to find neon green eyes staring at her. Chat smiled.

“There’s no lying about it: it would be pretty bad. But we’d be able to go through it together, so in the long run, worrying about it isn’t something I’d do. Our support group for kids with inordinately large guilt complexes should be strong enough, I think.”

Marinette didn’t know what to say, so she stared at his face a bit more, smiling back. His eyes were very, very soft. 

Suddenly, she did _feel_ what to say, though, so she opened her mouth–

Marinette jumped three feet into the air and immediately regretted letting go of his hand. The slight chill hit her now that there wasn’t a warm body next to her. She started looking around, desperate for a distraction, when she realised that her place wasn’t too far off.

“Come on,” she said, reaching down to grab Chat’s hand again and pull him up to his feet. “We’re going to steal whatever leftover croissants my parents have, and then we’re going to play Ultimate Mecha Strike for a bit, and then everything will be fine.”

She looked over at Chat to find him raising an eyebrow, looking fifty kinds of confused (wow, she’d really been switching emotional gears a lot, hadn’t she?). Marinette tried to grin in a way that was more ‘i’m just trying to cheer up’ than ‘i’m very terrified of the thought I just had and need to escape it’. He grinned back at her, shaking his head, and then Marinette let go of his hand and _ran._

 **(‘I love you’** **is the hardest sentence, isn’t it?**

_...You made it like that on purpose, didn’t you, Tikki?_

**No comment.)**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the beta on the chapter and the title to [Mal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmReynolds/pseuds/MalcolmReynolds) and [Elle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady3ellewrites/pseuds/Lady3ellewrites) respectively, and shout-out to [Bri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sukker_sugar/pseuds/sukker_sugar) for unleashing the full power of their spelling mistakes in masterpieces like 'jonk' in the [Miraculous Writer's Guild](https://mlwritersguild.tumblr.com/)'s Discord Server.
> 
> This chapter was brought to you by the Hamilton soundtrack, my having more time this half-term, the approaching Spring, and the mysterious ways of the Meta Consciousness.
> 
> Comments in my inbox make my day. Find me on [Tumblr](https://noirshitsuji.tumblr.com/) as well.


End file.
